"Round each mortal's cradle flying,
Close the mother's couch beside,
Hordes of woes are softly sighing,
Gloom and care with them abide.
Tears the tender eyes bedewing,
Fears the budding smile subduing,
Shrieks the infant's lips are parting,
While dawn's heralds onward glide.
And when childhood's time is vanished,
Youth's brief joy has had its day,
Garlands won are faded, banished,
Gone is love's bewitching play—
When, alas! the dreams have perished,
Once so fondly, proudly cherished,
Hide e'en dead delights and pleasures
In the pangs of death away."
In these stanzas the melancholy that was peculiar to Paludan-Müller becomes apparent. There is here betrayed that view of death which developed into a tendency to dwell on the thought of death, and which was destined eventually to burst forth in the love of death manifested by a Tithon, a Kalanus, or an Ahasuerus. We here detect the interest in the law of destruction which later produced the poem "Abels Död" (The Death of Abel), the belief that dead happiness embraces within itself all the pangs of death which found expression in "Tithon," and the feeling that dissolution lurks ever on the threshold of life and of joy, which so often breaks through the poetry of Paludan-Müller. Pay heed, for instance, to the following lines from the poem entitled "Dance Music":—
"Lo! the sunshine, golden, gleaming,
Lights with smiles the azure skies!
Yonder cloud speeds onward, beaming;
Like a bird, with wings, it flies.
Hear the ringing
Now of singing
That is filling
Lofty trees with music thrilling,—
All this glory swiftly dies."
We may call this tone shrill, yet it did not jar like a false note in the ear of Paludan-Müller. On the contrary, he found a certain satisfaction, a certain consolation, indeed, in keeping before his own eyes and those of others the inexorable, the inevitable fate of all that is finite. When the custom of circulating the photographs of celebrated men, with a brief autograph inscription, came into vogue, he wrote beneath a picture that represented him reading a book, the characteristic words:—
"All earthly things, 'tis written here,
Go up and down by turns;
So he who stands above to-day
What is before him learns."
Justice, however, has not been accorded to the drama "Amor and Psyche," if attention be merely called to the fact that it is the harbinger of the poet's most beautiful and profound works. As intellectual poetry it has a connected and complete symbolism which obliges the author to be more rigid than ever before in handling his materials, and it is distinguished by that peculiar tinting which is so characteristic of Paludan-Müller's mythological poems. It is not a strong tinting, now gray in gray, now light in light; yet the poem is by no means colorless. The truth is, its hue is that of the reflection of pearls, the glimmer of mother of pearl, the delicate play of prismatic shades that might have radiated from the shell in which Venus emerged from the sea. The Phantasus of Paludan-Müller paints the portrait of Psyche for Amor on just such a "pearl-white" shell; and this is almost symbolic of the way in which the poet himself has executed the form of Psyche. This class of his creations, indeed, is not of an earthly nature; earth is not their true home, and even those among them who like Psyche are of earthly descent, must bid to earth a final imperative farewell.
Psyche (kneeling).
"Gaia, thou hallowéd mother,
Who gave me birth and protection.
Thou from whose lips ever tender,
I heard life's earliest accents,
Take thou thy daughter's farewell!
Nevermore shall I behold thee,
Never again shall I wander
Over the loved spots of memory.
* * * * * * *
Yonder, in heavenly mansions,
Earthly sorrows will vanish."
The entire poetic endeavor of Paludan-Müller in this period was, upon the whole, one magnificent, many-shaded leave-taking of Gaia. What else, indeed, was the tendency of romance! It feared and shunned the life about it, and the era so wholly devoid of character in which its poets, to their sorrow, found themselves born. Paludan-Müller with his whole soul shared this repugnance of the romantic school for the actual surroundings of the poet, as well as its aversion to lingering, even in fancy, about this heavy, dark globe which kept up its ceaseless revolutions with the poet and all his air-castles, whether he would have it so or not. The age in which he lived was loathsome to him, and he had his own era and his own contemporaries in mind when he permitted Tithon to say of his:—
"What fruits thinkest thou this era will develop?
An era 'tis that needs a mighty storm
To rouse its energies from heavy slumber;
An era full of dreams instead of efforts,
Of petty competition, not of action bold;
An era when each crowns himself with glory
And sees himself in heroes of the past,
When mortals would be lofty as immortals
And yet have servile minds—how I abhor them!"
True, this description concerns Asia Minor at the time of the Trojan War; but it is one that accords marvellously well with that given in "Adam Homo" of the reign of Christian VIII. in Denmark:—