VIII.
In August, 1863, on a walking tour through North Sjaelland, Julius Lange introduced me to his other celebrated uncle, Frederik Paludan-Müller, 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-Müller 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-Müller 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. Unjustly so, since he himself was perfectly satisfied with her, and was apparently wholly absorbed by a union which had had its share in isolating him from the world. His wife was even more theologically inclined than himself, and appeared anonymously--without anyone having a suspicion of the fact--as a religious authoress. Still, she was exceedingly kind to anyone, regardless of their private opinions, who had found favour in the poet's eyes.
The dry little old lady was the only one of her sex with whom Paludan- Müller was intimate. He regarded all other women, however young and beautiful, as mere works of art. But his delight in them was charming in him, just because of its freedom from sense. One evening that he was giving a little banquet in honour of a Swedish lady painter, named Ribbing, a woman of rare beauty, he asked her to stand by the side of the bust of the Venus of Milo, that the resemblance, which really existed between them, might be apparent. His innocent, enthusiastic delight in the likeness was most winning.