And he was perfectly loyal to his promise. Moreover, the
question here was one of literature only, and not politics.
As the Danish authors were to be dealt with in alphabetical order, the
article that had to be set about at once was an account of the only
Danish poet whose name began with _Aa_. Thus it was that Emil
Aarestrup came to be the first Danish poet of the past of whom I chanced
to write. I heard of the existence of a collection of unprinted letters
from Aarestrup to his friend Petersen, the grocer, which were of very
great advantage to my essay. A visit that I paid to the widow of the
poet, on the other hand, led to no result whatever. It was strange to
meet the lady so enthusiastically sung by Aarestrup in his young days,
as a sulky and suspicious old woman without a trace of former beauty,
who declared that she had no letters from her husband, and could not
give me any information about him. It was only a generation later that
his letters to her came into my hands.
In September, 1865, the article on Aarestrup was finished. It was
intended to be quickly followed up by others on the remaining Danish
authors in A. But it was the only one that was written, for Algreen-
Ussing's apparently so well planned undertaking was suddenly brought to
a standstill. The proprietors of the National Liberal papers declared,
as soon as they heard of the plan, that they would not on any account
agree to its being carried out by a man who took up such a "reactionary"
position in Danish politics as Ussing, and in face of their threat to
annihilate the undertaking, the publishers, who were altogether
dependent on the attitude of these papers, did not dare to defy them.
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