Dying in 1848, Blicher was buried in Jutland, near the heath on which he spent whole days and nights of happy solitude. On one side of the stone above his grave is engraved a golden plover, on the other a pair of heath-larks, and around the foot a garland of heather, in memory of that intimate life with nature which, through his own great love for it, he endeared to all his readers.
A PICTURE
From the 'Poems'
I lay on my heathery hills alone;
The storm-winds rushed o'er me in turbulence loud;
My head rested lone on the gray moorland stone;
My eyes wandered skyward from cloud unto cloud.
There wandered my eyes, but my thoughts onward passed,
Far beyond cloud-track or tempest's career;
At times I hummed songs, and the desolate waste
Was the first the sad chimes of my spirit to hear.
Gloomy and gray are the moorlands where rest
My fathers, yet there doth the wild heather bloom,
And amid the old cairns the lark buildeth her nest,
And sings in the desert, o'er hill-top and tomb.
From Hewitt's 'Literature of Northern Europe.'
THE KNITTING-ROOM
It was the eve before Christmas Eve--no, stop! I am lying--it was the eve before that, come to think of it, that there was a knitting-bee going on at the schoolmaster's, Kristen Kornstrup's,--you know him? There were plenty that knew him, for in the winter he was schoolmaster, and in the summer he was mason, and he was alike clever at both. And he could do more than that, for he could stop the flow of blood, and discover stolen goods, and make the wind turn, and read prayers over felons, and much more too. But at this exorcising he was not so good as the parson, for he had not been through the black school.
So we had gathered there from the whole town,--oh, well, Lysgaard town is not so mighty big: there are only six farms and some houses, but then they were there too from Katballe and Testrup, and I think the lads from Knakkeborg had drifted over too--but that doesn't matter. We had got it measured off at last, and all of us had got our yarn over the hook in the ceiling above the table, and had begun to let the five needles work. Then the schoolmaster says, "Isn't there one of you that will sing something or tell something? then it will go so nicely with the work here." Then she began to speak, Kirsten Pedersdatter from Paps,--for she is always forward about speaking:--"I could sing you a little ditty if you cared to hear it--" "That we do," said I, "rattle it off!"--And she sang a ditty--I had never heard it before, but I remember it well enough, and it ran this way:--