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Lawn-tennis and croquet are very popular, but the latter is the favourite pastime of the Danish ladies. Funen, the island which lies between the Great and Little Belts, is known as the "Garden of Denmark," on account of its beauty and fertility. In Odense, the capital, Ingeborg had lived happily all the fifteen summers of her life. Now she was to have an unexpected treat.
I celebrated my birthday in the Acropolis. From Athens I sailed to Smyrna, and with me it was no childish pleasure to be able to tread another quarter of the globe. I felt a devotion in it, like that which I felt as a child when I entered the old church at Odense. I thought on Christ, who bled on this earth; I thought on Homer, whose song eternally resounds hence over the earth.
This piece had been performed in Odense by the royal company, and the principal characters had so greatly taken my fancy, that I could play the part perfectly from memory. In the mean time I asked her permission to take off my boots, otherwise I was not light enough for this character; and then taking up my broad hat for a tambourine, I began to dance and sing,
On this the wife had removed with him to Odense, and there put her son, whose mind was full of intelligence, apprentice to a shoemaker; it could not be otherwise, although it was his ardent wish to be able to attend the Grammar School, where he might have learned Latin.
This church he had just commenced to build. There is a story that when the tower was building, an apprentice told his master he was as good a builder. The master-builder went out of the tower on the scaffolding and stuck an axe into it, and told the apprentice to go and fetch it, if he could. The apprentice went, but called out that an adjoining village was approaching the town of Odense.
In our time the old house is become a manufactory; the broken windows, the gaps of which are repaired either with slips of wood or with paper, the quantity of human bones which are found in the garden, and which remain from the time when this was a church-yard, give to the whole place a peculiar interest to the common people of Odense.
"There is a deal of pleasure in the world," said Wilhelm, "if people will only enjoy it. If one day in Paris is a brilliant flower, a day at Odense fair is also a flower. It is a merry, charming world that we live in!
There surely went out of the world something still undeveloped in that poor shoemaker. At a subsequent period of the history we find him fairly abandoning his unchosen trade. The name of Napoleon resounded even in Odense even in Odense could find a heart that is disquieted. He would follow the banner of him who had "opened a career to all the talents."
"One must not take it in that way now!" said Sophie, laughing, and turned the subject. "In Odense, aristocracy and democracy held out the longest," said Wilhelm, smiling; "yet I remember, in my childhood, that when the nobles and the citizens met on the king's birthday at the town-house ball, that we danced by ourselves."
Our poet we call him such, though we know nothing of his verses, for whatever there is of merit in his writings is of the nature of poetry our poet of childhood and of poverty, was born at Odense, a town of Funen, one of the green, beech-covered islands of Denmark. It bears the name of the Scandinavian hero, or demigod, Odin; Tradition says he lived there.
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