VIII.
In August, 1863, on a walking tour through North Sjaelland, Julius Lange
introduced me to his other celebrated uncle, Frederik Paludan-Mueller,
whose Summer residence was at Fredensborg. In appearance he was of a
very different type from his brother Caspar. The distinguishing mark of
the one was power, of the other, nobility. For Frederik Paludan-Mueller
as a poet I cherished the profoundest admiration. He belonged to the
really great figures of Danish literature, and his works had so fed and
formed my inmost nature that I should scarcely be the same had I not
read them. It was unalloyed happiness to have access to his house and be
allowed to enjoy his company. It was a distinction to be one of the few
he vouchsafed to take notice of and one of the fewer still in whose
future he interested himself. Do the young men of Denmark to-day, I
wonder, admire creative intellects as they were admired by some few of
us then? It is in so far hardly possible, since there is not at the
present time any Northern artist with such a hall-mark of refined
delicacy as Frederik Paludan-Mueller possessed.
The young people who came to his house might have wished him a younger,
handsomer wife, and thought his choice, Mistress Charite, as, curiously
enough, she was called, not quite worthy of the poet.
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