VII.
For nearly ten years I went to one and the same school. I came to know the way there and back, to and from the three different places, all near together, where my parents lived during the time, as I knew no other. In that part of the town, all about the Round Tower, I knew, not only every house, but every archway, every door, every window, every Paving-stone. It all gradually imprinted itself so deeply upon me that in after years, when gazing on foreign sights and foreign towns, even after I had been living for a long time in the same place, I had a curious feeling that, however beautiful and fascinating it all might be, or perhaps for that very reason, it was dreamland, unreality, which would one day elude me and vanish; reality was the Round Tower in Copenhagen and all that lay about it. It was ugly, and altogether unattractive, but it was reality. That you always found again.
Similarly, though in a somewhat different sense, the wooded landscape in the neighbourhood of Copenhagen, to be exact, the view over the Hermitage Meadows down to the Sound, as it appears from the bench opposite the Slesvig Stone, the first and dearest type of landscape beauty with which I became acquainted, was endowed to me with an imprint of actuality which no other landscape since, be it never so lovely or never so imposing, has ever been able to acquire.