II.
Before I could start, I had to finish the pamphlet which, with Sibbern's help, I had written against Nielsen's adjustment of the split between Protestant orthodoxy and the scientific view of the universe, and which I had called Dualism in our Modern Philosophy. I was not troubled with any misgivings as to how I should get the book published. As long ago as 1864 a polite, smiling, kindly man, who introduced himself to me as Frederik Hegel, the bookseller, had knocked at the door of my little room and asked me to let him print the essay which I had written for my Master of Arts examination, and if possible he would also like the paper which had won the University gold medal; and in fact, anything else I might wish published. To my amazed reply that those essays were not worth publishing, and that in general I did not consider what I wrote sufficiently mature for publication, Hegel had first suggested that I should leave that question to the publisher, and then, when he saw that my refusal was honestly meant, had simply asked me to take my work to him when I myself considered that the moment had arrived. On this occasion, as on many others, the acute and daring publisher gave proof of the flair which made him the greatest in the North. He accepted the little book without raising any difficulties, merely remarking that it would have to be spread out a little in the printing, that it might not look too thin. Even before the pamphlet was mentioned in the Press, its author was on his way to foreign parts.
III.
On one of the first days of November, I journeyed, in a tremendous storm, to Lübeck, the characteristic buildings of which (the Church of Mary, the Exchange, the Town-hall), together with the remains of the old fortifications, aroused my keen interest. In this Hanse town, with its strongly individual stamp, I found myself carried back three hundred years.
I was amazed at the slave-like dress of the workmen, the pointed hats of the girls, and the wood pavements, which were new to me.
I travelled through Germany with a Portuguese, a little doctor from the University of Coimbra, in whose queer French fifteen was kouss and Goethe Shett. A practical American, wrapped up in a waterproof, took up three places to lie down in one evening, pretended to sleep, and never stirred all night, forcing his inexperienced fellow- travellers to crowd up into the corners of the carriage, and when the day broke, chatted with them as pleasantly as if they and he were the best friends in the world.
At Cologne, where I had stood, reverential, in the noble forest of pillars in the Cathedral, then afterwards, in my simplicity, allowed someone to foist a whole case of Eau de Cologne upon me, I shortened my stay, in my haste to see Paris. But, having by mistake taken a train which would necessitate my waiting several hours at Liège, I decided rather to continue my journey to Brussels and see that city too. The run through Belgium seemed to me heavenly, as for a time I happened to be quite alone in my compartment and I walked up and down, intoxicated with the joy of travelling.
Brussels was the first large French town I saw; it was a foretaste of Paris, and delighted me.
Never having been out in the world on my own account before, I was still as inexperienced and awkward as a child. It was not enough that I had got into the wrong train; I discovered, to my shame, that I had mislaid the key of my box, which made me think anxiously of the customs officials in Paris, and I was also so stupid as to ask the boots in the Brussels hotel for "a little room," so that they gave me a miserable little sleeping-place under the roof.
But at night, after I had rambled about the streets of Brussels, as I sat on a bench somewhere on a broad boulevard, an overwhelming, terrifying, transporting sense of my solitariness came over me. It seemed to me as though now, alone in a foreign land, at night time, in this human swarm, where no one knew me and I knew no one, where no one would look for me if anything were to happen to me, I was for the first time thrown entirely on my own resources, and I recognised in the heavens, with a feeling of reassurance, old friends among the stars.