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Her noble, beautifully formed countenance seemed bloodless; her dark-blue eyes beamed with a brilliancy which seemed like that of delirium; her beauty, her calmness, and yet this obduracy in crime, produced an extraordinary impression upon the spectators. She was sentenced to the House of Correction in Odense.
Yet, precisely amid this apparently great un-happiness lay the stepping-stones of a better fortune. As I found myself again abandoned, and was pondering by myself upon what was best for me next to do, it occurred to me that the Poet Guldberg, a brother of the Colonel of that name in Odense, who had shown me so much kindness, lived in Copenhagen.
"I can tell from the beginning," said she, "that it will turn out extraordinary." I regarded her penetration with a sort of reverence. Once in the harvest time my mother took me with her many miles from Odense to a nobleman's seat in the neighborhood of Bogense, her native place.
I wept, I prayed, and at last my mother consented, after having first sent for a so-called wise woman out of the hospital, that she might read my future fortune by the coffee-grounds and cards. "Your son will become a great man," said the old woman, "and in honor of him, Odense will one day be illuminated." My mother wept when she heard that, and I obtained permission to travel.
This brook runs through Odense, and must, in former times, when united with the Odense River, have formed an island where the city at that time stood; hence some people derive the name of Odense from Odins Ei, or Odins Ö, that is, Odin's Island.
I thought it was not quite right that these dignified personages, as in Shakspeare, should speak like other men and women. I asked my mother and different people how a king ought properly to speak, but no one knew exactly. They said that it was so many years since a king had been in Odense, but that he certainly spoke in a foreign language.
Homage was paid to her, and she was honored; and I vividly remember thinking how happy she must be. Many years afterwards, when, as a student, I visited Odense, I saw, in one of the chambers of the hospital where the poor widows lived and where one bed stood by another, a female portrait hanging over one bed in a gilt frame.
"In fact Odense would be, at New Year's time, a city for these two composers. You must know that at that season drums and fifes are in their glory. They drum the New Year in. Seven or eight little drummers and fifers go from door to door, attended by children and old women; at that time they beat both the tattoo and the reveille. For this they get a few pence.
One day, when he was returning to Odense, I heard the boys in the street shouting after him; I hid myself behind a flight of steps in terror, for I knew that I was of his flesh and blood. Every circumstance around me tended to excite my imagination.
His descendants still live in Odense, namely, the family of the printer Ch. It was an afternoon in the summer of 1810; the water was high in the brook, yet two washerwomen were busily employed in it; reed-matting was fast bound round their bodies, and they beat with wooden staves the clothes upon their washing-stools. They were in deep conversation, and yet their labor went on uninterruptedly.
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