CHAPTER XXXVIII.
DENMARK.

WE are coming down to Denmark. Down from Norway and along the coast of Sweden. First through the Skagerack and then the Cattegat, in the steamer Excellent Toll, by name, with twenty American passengers. Fleets of sailing vessels were in sight, the crews engaged in the mackerel fishery, a great business off this coast. The day was as lovely as the suns of Italy ever show, and the sunset revealed such splendors as I never saw except in Mantua, under Italian skies.

The sun went down as if into the western ocean, where poets often tell us he “quenches his beams.” A few clouds were lying along the horizon, in long rifts stretching a quarter of the way around the great circle of the heavens. They were burnished with golden splendors, and among the rifts the sky seemed painted with the hues of the rainbow. The passengers stood on the upper deck, and all were in raptures of admiration gazing upon the magnificent scene. Long after the sun was gone the great picture hung on the northern sky, and we watched it till the many-colored painting gradually and finally faded into the sombre tints of evening. The moon then gave us silver for gold, and for some hours after sunset it looked as though the sun were rising!

We passed the night on this voyage, touching at Gottenberg at midnight, for an hour only. The next day (July 10) was equally brilliant with the first, and the run along down the coast was exciting and pleasant. About midday we entered the Sound and soon came to Elsinore, where we had no Sound duties to pay. From time immemorial—so long that the date of the origin of the custom is lost in the fogs of the region—the Danes have been accustomed to demand and receive toll from every vessel passing Elsinore. No end of trouble was the result of this. The Vienna treaty of 1815, after Napoleon’s downfall, confirmed the Danes in their enjoyment of this imposition. Some nations afterwards commuted with Denmark, and the whole thing was abolished in 1857.

In the time of Tycho Brahe, the famous astronomer, whose house we saw on one of the lakes in Sweden as we were going to Upsala, the Danes built a mighty castle here, called Kronborg, and mounted big guns, so as to sweep the Sound and make it very desirable for vessels to stop as they were going by and pay their toll. If they refused to do so they were spoken to by these guns. And sometimes it was a word and a blow. This castle is famous in the legends and history of Denmark, and within the last hundred years it has held distinguished and royal prisoners, who have exchanged dungeons for the scaffold. Down in the subterranean casemates a thousand men may be stored away—soldiers to defend the castle, or prisoners to pine in captivity. In one of these secret hiding places, where neither light nor pity finds its way, a noted mythical giant of Danish story is said to reside. He never comes up to the surface of the earth, but when the State is in danger, and then he takes the head of the army and leads it on to victory. His grasp is so strong that his fingers leave their imprint on an iron crowbar when he holds it in his fist.

The views from the castle and from any of the elevations in Elsinore embrace the town, the fortifications, Helsingborg on the other side of the Sound, the Great Belt, the Baltic dotted with sails,—a grand panorama indeed.

Shakespeare was kind enough to make this vicinity classic and famous by his Hamlet, whose grave is said to be here, and travellers come to find it, as they look for Romeo and Juliet’s at Verona. In vain we are told that Hamlet did not live nor die in these parts; that Jutland and not Zealand, was his country. But they pay their money and they take their choice, and most of people choose to believe that Hamlet was buried hereabouts, and any heap of stones with Runic characters upon them would answer the purpose, but they cannot find even this. Drop the letter H and we have Amlet, and that signifies madman, and so you have the beginning of the story on which the tragedy was founded. And the story runs in this wise in the gossipy guide-books, so useful to travellers, and especially to those who have to write about their travels.

According to the Danish history of old Saxo Grammaticus, Hamlet was not the son of a Danish king, but of a famous pirate-chief, who was governor of Jutland in conjunction with his brother. Hamlet’s father married the daughter of the Danish king, and the issue of that marriage was Hamlet. Hamlet’s father was subsequently murdered by his brother, who married the widow and succeeded to the government of the whole of Jutland. As a pagan, it was Hamlet’s first duty to avenge his father. The better to conceal his purpose, he feigned madness. His uncle, suspecting it to be feigned, sent him to England, with a request to the king that he would put Hamlet to death. He was accompanied by two creatures of his uncle, whose letter to the English king was carved upon wood, according to the custom of the period. This Hamlet during the voyage contrived to get possession of, and so altered the characters as to make it a request that his two companions should be slain, and which was accordingly done on their arrival in England. He afterwards married the daughter of the English king: but subsequently returning to Jutland, and still feigning madness, contrived to surprise and slay his uncle, after upbraiding him with his various crimes. Hamlet then became governor of Jutland, married a second time to a queen of Scotland, and was eventually killed in battle.

I wish we could stop at Frederiksborg, but we must come back to it from Copenhagen. For here is the royal castle of Denmark, built in 1600, and now the repository of works of art and objects of antiquarian interest connected with the reigning house. It was in this castle that the unfortunate queen of Christian VII. died at the early age of twenty-three, a broken-hearted victim of slander and conspiracy. In one of the private rooms in which this beautiful woman was a prisoner, she wrote with a diamond upon the window pane this touching and self-sacrificing prayer:—