Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

The one splendid sight in Copenhagen is its great dragon spire. This, one could stand and gaze at by the day. It is made of four dragons twisted together, heads down, tails up; heads pointing to the four corners of the earth; tails tapering and twisting, and twisting and tapering, till they taper out into an iron rod, which mounts still higher, with three gilded balls, and three wrought gilded circles on it, and finally ends in a huge gilded open-work weather-cock. This is on an old brick building now used as the Exchange. It was built early in 1600 by Christian IV., who seems to me to have done everything best worth doing that was ever done in Denmark. His monogram (

) is forever cropping out on all the splendid old things. They are enlarging this Exchange now; and the new red brick and glaring white marble make a very unpleasing contrast to the old part of the building, although every effort has been made to copy the style of it exactly. It is long, and not high, the wall divided into spaces by carved pilasters between every two windows. Each pilaster begins as a man or a woman,—arms cut off at the shoulders, breasts and shoulders looking from a distance grotesquely like four humps. Where the legs should begin, the trunk ends in a great gargoyle,—a lion's head, or a man's, or a bull's,—some grotesque, some beautiful; below this, a conventional tapering support. In the pointed arch of each of the lower windows, also a carved head, no two of them alike, many of them beautiful. It is a grand old building, and one might study it and draw from it by the week. Passing this and crossing an arm of the sea,—which, by the way, you are perpetually doing in Copenhagen to go anywhere, the sea never having fully made up its mind to abandon the situation,—you come to another quaint old building in the suburbs, called Christianshaven. This is Vor Frelser's Church (Our Saviour's Church), built only fifty years later than the Exchange. It is a dark red brick church, with tiny flat dormer windows let in and painted green on a shining tile roof; a square belfry; clock face painted red, black, and blue; above this, a spire, first six-sided and then round, 288 feet high, covered with copper, which is bright green in places, and wound round and round by a glittering gilded staircase, which goes to the very top and ends under a huge gilt ball, under which twelve people can stand. This also is a fine kind of spire to have at hand at sunset; it flames out like a ladder into the sky.

One more old church has a way up, which is worth telling, though you can't see it from the outside. This is another of that same Christian IV.'s buildings,—it was built for an observatory, and used for that for two hundred years, but then joined to a church. The tower is round, 115 feet high, 48 feet in diameter, and made of two hollow cylinders. Between these is the way up, a winding stone road, smooth and broad; and if you'll believe it, in 1716 that rascal Catherine of Russia actually drove up to the top of it in a coach and four, Peter going ahead on horseback. I walked up two of the turns of this stone roadway, and it made me dizzy to think what a clatter the five horses' hoofs must have made, with stone above, below, and around them; and what a place it would have been to have knocked brains out if the horses had been frightened! In this inside cylinder all the University treasures were hidden when the English bombarded the city in 1807, and a very safe place it must have been.

Opposite this church is still another of Christian IV.'s good works,—a large brick building put up for the accommodation of poor students at the University. One hundred poor students still have free lodgings in this building, but part of it looks as if its roof would fall in before long.

Along the arms of the sea which stretch into or across the city—for some of them go way through, come out, and join the outer waters again—are rows of high warehouses for grain, some seven and eight stories high. These have two-storied dormer windows, and terraced roofs, and a great beak like a ship's prow projecting from the ridge-pole of the dormer window. From this the grain is lowered and hoisted to and from the ships below. The ships lie crowded in these narrow arms, as in a harbor, and make picturesque lanes of mast-tops through the city. On many of them are hung great strings of flounders drying, festooned on cords, from rope to rope, scores of them on a single sloop. They look better than they smell; you could not spare them out of the picture.

The last thing we saw this afternoon was the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, which has just been put up in the great garden of Rosenborg Castle. This garden is generally called Kongen's Have ("The King's Garden"). It was planned by the good Christian, but contains now very little of his original design. Two splendid avenues of horse-chestnut trees and a couple of old bronze lions are all that is left as he saw it. It is a great place of resort for the middle classes with their children. A yearly tax of two kroners (about fifty cents) permits a family to take its children there every day; and I am sure there must have been two hundred children in sight as I walked up the dark dense shaded avenue of linden trees at the upper end of which sits the beloved Hans Christian, with the sunlight falling on his head. "The children come here every day," said the commissionnaire; "and that is the reason they put him here, so they can see him." He looked as if he also saw them. A more benignant, lifelike, tender look was never wrought in bronze. He sits, half wrapped in a cloak, his left hand holding a book carelessly on his knee, the right hand lifted as if in benediction of the children. The statue is raised a few feet on a plain pedestal, in a large oval bed of flowers: on one side the pedestal is carved the "Child and the Stork;" on the other, the group of ducks, with the "ugly" one in the middle,—pictures that every little child will understand and love to see; on the front is his name and a wreath of the bay he so well earned. Written above is,—

"PUT UP BY THE DANISH PEOPLE;"

and I thought as I stood there that he was more to be envied than Christian IV. with his splendors of art and architecture, or than the whole Danish dynasty, with their priceless treasures and their jewelled orders. And so ended our first day in Copenhagen.

The next morning, Sunday, I drove out to church in the island of Amager, of which that paradoxical compound of truth and falsehood, Murray, says: "It offers absolutely nothing of interest." I always find it very safe to go to places of which that is said. Amager is Copenhagen's vegetable garden. It is an island four miles square, and absolutely flat,—as flat as a piece of pasteboard; in fact, while I was driving on it, it seemed to me to bear the same relation to flatness that the Irishman's gun did to recoiling,—"If it recoiled at all, it recoiled forrards,"—so it was a very safe gun. If Amager is anything more or less than flat, it is bent inwards; for actually when I looked off to the water it seemed to be higher than the land, and the ships looked as if they might any minute come sailing down among the cabbages. Early in the sixteenth century it was filled up by Dutch people; and there they are to this day, wearing the same clothes and raising cabbages just as they did three hundred years ago. To reach Amager from Copenhagen, you cross several arms of the sea and go through one or two suburbs called by different names; but you would never know that you were not driving in Copenhagen all the time until you come out into the greenery of Amager itself. It was good luck to go of a Sunday. All the Dutch dames were out and about in their best, driving in carts and walking, or sitting in their doorways. The women were "sights to behold." The poorer ones wore shirred sunbonnets on their heads, made of calico, coming out like an old poke-bonnet in front, and with full capes which set out at a fly-away angle behind. They seemed to have got the conception of the cape from the arms of their own windmills (of which, by the way, there are several on the island; and their revolving arms add to the island's expression of being insecurely at sea!). Next below the sunbonnet came a gay handkerchief crossed on the breast, over a black gown with tight sleeves; a full bright blue apron, reaching half-way round the waist and coming down to within two inches of the bottom of the overskirt, completed their rig. It was droller than it sounds. Some of them wore three-cornered handkerchiefs pinned outside their poke-bonnets, pinned under their chins, and the point falling over the neck behind. These were sometimes plain colors, sometimes white, embroidered or trimmed with lace. The men looked exactly like any countrymen in England or Scotland or America. If we haven't an international anything else, we have very nearly an international costume for the masculine human creature; and it is as ugly and unpicturesque a thing as malignity itself could devise. The better class of women wore a plain black bonnet, made in the same poke shape as the sunbonnets, but without any cape at all on the back, only a little full crown tucked in, and the fronts coming round very narrow in the back of the neck, and tied there with narrow black ribbons. Don't fancy these were the only strings that held the roof in its place,—not at all. Two very broad strings, of bright blue, or red, or purple, as it might be, came from somewhere high up inside the front, and tied under the chin in a huge bow, so that their faces looked as if they had first been tied up in broad ribbon for the toothache, and then the huge bonnet put on outside of all. Strangely enough, the effect on the faces was not ugly. Old faces were sheltered and softened, double chins and scraggy necks were hid, and younger faces peered out prettily from under the scoop and among the folds of ribbon; and the absolute plainness of the bonnet itself, having no trimming save a straight band across the middle, gave the charm of simplicity to the outline, and vindicated the worth of that most emphatically when set side by side in the church pews with the modern bonnets,—all bunches and bows, and angles and tilts of feathers and flowers and rubbish generally.