XX.
I had lived so little with Nature. The Spring of 1865, the first Spring I had spent in the country--although quite near to Copenhagen--meant to me rich impressions of nature that I never forgot, a long chain of the most exquisite Spring memories. I understood as I had never done before the inborn affection felt by every human being for the virgin, the fresh, the untouched, the not quite full-blown, just as it is about to pass over into its maturity. It was in the latter half of May. I was looking for anemones and violets, which had not yet gone to seed. The budding beech foliage, the silver poplar with its shining leaves, the maple with its blossoms, stirred me, filled me with Spring rapture. I could lie long in the woods with my gaze fastened on a light-green branch with the sun shining through it, and, as if stirred by the wind, lighted up from different sides, and floating and flashing as if coated with silver. I saw the empty husks fall by the hundred before the wind. I followed up the streams in the wood to their sources. For a while a rivulet oozed slowly along. Then came a little fall, and it began to speak, to gurgle and murmur; but only at this one place, and here it seemed to me to be like a young man or woman of twenty. Now that I, who in my boyhood's days had gone for botanical excursions with my master and school-fellows, absorbed myself in every plant, from greatest to least, without wishing to arrange or classify any, it seemed as though an infinite wisdom in Nature were being revealed to me for the first time.
As near to Copenhagen as Söndermarken, stood the beech, with its curly leaves and black velvet buds in their silk jackets. In the gardens of Frederiksberg Avenue, the elder exhaled its fragrance, but was soon over; the hawthorn sprang out in all its splendour. I was struck by the loveliness of the chestnut blooms. When the blossom on the cherry-trees had withered, the lilac was out, and the apple and pear-trees paraded their gala dress.
It interested me to notice how the colour sometimes indicated the shape, sometimes produced designs quite independently of it. I loitered in gardens to feast my eyes on the charming grouping of the rhubarb leaves no less than on the exuberance of their flowers, and the leaves of the scorzonera attracted my attention, because they all grew in one plane, but swung about like lances.
And as my habit was, I philosophised over what I saw and had made my own, and I strove to understand in what beauty consisted. I considered the relations between beauty and life; why was it that artificial flowers and the imitation of a nightingale's song were so far behind their originals in beauty? What was the difference between the beauty of the real, the artificial and the painted flower? Might not Herbart's Aesthetics be wrong, in their theory of form? The form itself might be the same in Nature and the imitation, in the rose made of velvet and the rose growing in the garden. And I reflected on the connection between the beauty of the species and that of the individual. Whether a lily be a beautiful flower, I can say without ever having seen lilies before, but whether it be a beautiful lily, I cannot. The individual can only be termed beautiful when more like than unlike to the ideal of the species. And I mused over the translation of the idea of beauty into actions and intellectual conditions. Was not the death of Socrates more beautiful than his preservation of Alcibiades' life in battle?--though this was none the less a beautiful act.