'Yes, I can though,' said my cousin, who immediately began to speak in the Jutland dialect, to the infinite diversion of the worthy Peder Andersen who, however, found still another stumbling-block to the perfections of the pretended peasant--namely, that his nice white hands would betray him.
'I can put them in my pocket' ('A ka put em i e Lomm),' cried my gay cousin, who was determined to admit of no drawback to his assumed character.
Presently we reached the river Gudenade, which is here tolerably wide, and has rather a swift current. We crossed in a boat something like a canoe, and then entered on quite another kind of a country; for here commenced the moorlands, covered with heather whose dark tints formed a strong contrast to the bright green on the east of the river. We had yet a good way to walk, and as the heather, which almost reached up to our knees, was still wet with rain, we had good reason to be grateful to our long boots. We approached the wood--a wood of magnificent beech-trees--which appeared to me here doubly beautiful, standing out, as it did, against so dark a background. Amidst sloping dales the path wound always upward; but the thickness of the foliage for a time deprived us of any view. At last we emerged from the wood, and found ourselves upon the open summit of the mountain.
When I hear delightful music, or witness an interesting theatrical representation, I always like to enjoy it for a time in silence. Nothing acts more unpleasantly, jars more on my feelings, than when any one attempts to call my attention to either. The moment the remark is made to me, 'How beautiful that is!' it becomes less beautiful to me These audible outbursts of admiration are to me like cold shower-baths, they quite chill me. After a time, when I have been left undisturbed, and by degrees have cooled in my excitement, I am willing to exchange thoughts and mingle feelings with those of a friend, or of many friends; indeed, I find desire growing within me to unburden, if I may so express it, my overladen mind. It is thus that a poet utters his inspirations: at the sweet moment when he conceives his ideas, they glow within him, but he is silent; afterwards he feels constrained to give them utterance; the voice or the pen must afford the full heart relief. Our guide's anxiety to please was a dreadful drawback to my comfort, for, with the usual loquacity of a cicerone, he began to point out and describe all the churches that could be described from the place where we were standing, invariably commencing with, 'Yonder you see.' I left my cousin to his elucidation of the country round, and, wandering to some little distance, I sat down where I could see, without being compelled to hear.
When Stolberg had finished translating Homer into German, he threw down his pen, and exclaimed, despondingly, 'Reader, learn Greek, and burn my translation!' What is a description of scenery but a translation? Yet the most successful one must be as much inferior to the original as the highest hill in Jutland is lower than the highest mountain in Thibet. Therefore, kind reader, pardon my not describing to you all I saw. What I saw I might, perhaps, be able to relate to you, but scarcely how I saw it. My pen is no artist's pencil; go yourself and take a view of it! But you, who perhaps have stood on the summit of the Brochen, or of St. Bernard, smile not that I think so much of our little mountain! It is the loftiest that I, or perhaps many of my readers, have beheld; therefore, what is diminutive to you is grand to us.
I was startled in my meditations by a thump on my shoulder--it was from my cousin, who was standing behind me. He informed me that our guide had gone home at least half-an-hour, and that I had been sitting for a long time perfectly motionless, without giving the slightest sign of life. He told me, moreover, that he was tired of such solemn silence, and I must really awaken from my fit of abstraction.
'And at what have you been looking that has engrossed your thoughts so much?' he added.
'The same as you have been looking at,' I replied: 'Air, and earth, and water.'
'Well, cast your eyes down now towards the lake,' said he, handing me his spy-glass, 'and you will see that there are some strangers coming over this way.'
I took the glass and perceived a boat a little way from the shore, which seemed to be steering straight across the water; it was full of people, and three straw bonnets indicated that there were women among them. My cousin proposed that we should await their coming, although it would be late before we should reach our quarters for the night at Alling. As the evening was so charming, I willingly consented; we could not have wished a finer one. The sun was about to set, but it seemed to us to sink more slowly than usual, as if it lingered to behold longer the beauty of earth when tinged with its own golden rays. The winds were hushed, not a blade of grass, not a leaf was stirring. The lake was as a mirror, wherein were reflected the fields, the groves, the houses that lay on its surrounding sides, while here and there, in the valleys towards the west, arose a thin column of smoke from dwellings that were concealed by trees. But if in the air all was silence, sounds enough proceeded from the earth. Feathered songsters carolled in the woods behind us, and before us the heath-lark's love-strains swelled, answering each other from the juniper-bushes. From the bulrushes which grew on the margin of the lake was heard the quacking of the wild ducks; and from a greater distance came the plashing of the fisherman's oar, as he was returning to his home, and the soothing tones of his vesper hymn.