August never had the courage to speak to her. His love expressed itself in gentle melancholy and vague wishes. He felt the victim of a secret within his own breast and suffered from it. The affair ended with a frustrated suicidal intention, but the lover did not attain to peace. His love affairs from the first to the last were tinged with tragedy, and were the vehicles of his restless and futile search for harmony.
The house in the north of Stockholm, to which the family had moved, had a large garden and adjoining fields. The father loved the country, and farming operations on a small scale were part of the daily duties. The boys were made to work in the garden, and were thus provided with healthy exercise. A magnificent old oak and bowers of lilac and jessamine made the old-fashioned garden beautiful. August's bitter experience of canes, teachers and unattainable feminine charm did not corrode his inborn love of nature, which remained a source of mental and physical rejuvenation when others ran dry.
The deep blackness of the freshly tilled soil, the apple trees in their blossoming glory, the tulips in their gorgeous garb called forth aspirations in his mind which responded to no human voice. The boy walking in the garden was filled with a solemnity which neither school nor church could inspire.
A summer holiday spent at Drottningholm, amidst the smiling islands and wooded shores of the Lake of Malär, had accentuated his disgust with the ugly things which abound in towns.
Stockholm's Skärgård, the archipelago which guards the fair capital of Sweden, and which is the pride of every true child of Stockholm, became his favourite scenery in later years.
There is something primæval and suggestive of the creation of the world in these thousands of rocks and islands which rise in ever-varying form and colour from the blue depths of the Baltic. The keen salt breezes which sweep round the bare and uninhabitable rocks whisper of a no-man's land, where the soul is tossed by elements neither friendly nor hostile, but restful. Through the white stems of the birches, the deep red of the cottages and the evergreen storm-bent fir trees, the islands on which the poor fisherfolk live and labour, salute the passing mariner by a trichromatic call to the simple life.
Upon this world the youthful Strindberg gazed one day. He had walked through a deep forest, and crept through whortleberries and juniper to the top of a steep rock. The picture of islands and fjords which lay spread before his eyes caused him to "shiver with, delight."
That picture, he writes, impressed him as if he had recovered a land seen in beautiful dreams, or in a former life.
He hid from his comrades; he could not follow them.
"This was his scenery, the true milieu of his nature, idylls, poor rugged rocks, covered with pine forest, thrown out on wide stormy fjords with the immense sea as a distant background. He remained true to this love ... and neither the Alps of Switzerland, the olive-dad hills of the Mediterranean, nor the cliffs of Normandy could oust this rival."