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Those present, the host, a certain Jens Paludan-Mueller, son of the historian, a certain Julius Lange, son of the Professor of Pedagogy, and a few others, received me as though they had been waiting for me to put the society on its legs; they talked as if I were going to do everything to entertain them, and as if they themselves cared to do nothing; they seemed to be indolent, almost sluggish.
It is in so far hardly possible, since there is not at the present time any Northern artist with such a hall-mark of refined delicacy as Frederik Paludan-Mueller possessed. The young people who came to his house might have wished him a younger, handsomer wife, and thought his choice, Mistress Charite, as, curiously enough, she was called, not quite worthy of the poet.
A month after the Students' Meeting, at the invitation of my friend Jens Paludan-Mueller, I spent a few weeks at his home at Nykjoebing, in the island of Falster, where his father, Caspar Paludan-Mueller, the historian, was at the time head master of the Grammar-school. Those were rich and beautiful weeks, which I always remembered later with gratitude.
In August, 1863, on a walking tour through North Sjaelland, Julius Lange introduced me to his other celebrated uncle, Frederik Paludan-Mueller, whose Summer residence was at Fredensborg. In appearance he was of a very different type from his brother Caspar. The distinguishing mark of the one was power, of the other, nobility.
One day that I went to Fredensborg, in response to an invitation from Frederik Paludan-Mueller, the poet said to me: "Have you been ill lately? You look so pale and shaken." I pretended not to care; whatever I said or did in company was incessant acting. I experienced revulsions of feeling similar to those that troubled Don Quixote.
Two young, handsome Counts Reventlow were being brought up in the house, still only half-grown boys at that time, but who were destined later to win honourable renown. One of them, the editor of his ancestress's papers, kept up his acquaintance with the guest he had met in the Paludan-Mueller home for over forty years.
The poet Paludan-Mueller and the Lange family visited at the house; so did the two young and marvellously beautiful girls, Alma Trepka and Clara Rothe, the former of whom was married later to Carl Bloch the painter, the other to her uncle, Mr. Falbe, the Danish Minister in London. It was hard to say which of the two was the more beautiful. Both were unusually lovely.
Frederik Nutzhorn read the Edda and the Niebelungenlied with me in the originals; with Jens Paludan-Mueller I went through the New Testament in Greek, and with Julius Lange, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Horace and Ovid, and a little of Aristotle and Theocritus. Catullus, Martial and Caesar I read for myself.
We had learnt all at once to know and appreciate each other to the full; we were united by a feeling of brotherhood and remained friends for life. The life allotted to several of the little band was, it is true, but short; Jens Paludan-Mueller fell at Sankelmark three and a half years later; Nutzhorn had only five years and a half to live. Of the others, Emil Petersen and Julius Lange are dead.
Frederik Nutzhorn, who did not believe there would be a war, started on a visit to Rome; Jens Paludan-Mueller, who had been called out, was quartered at Rendsborg until the German troops marched in; Julius Lange, who, as he had just become engaged, did not wish to see his work interrupted and his future prospects delayed by the war, had gone to Islingen, where he had originally made the acquaintance of his fiancee.
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