Niels Lyhne

by Jens Peter Jacobsen

virtue of their youth rather than their talent,

“How strange it is to long for one’s self!” she said; “and yet I often, so often, long for myself as a young girl. I love her as one whom I had been very close to

How often we have to submit to letting the man we love deck us out with his imagination, put a halo around our head, tie wings on our shoulders, and wrap us in a star-spangled robe! Then at last he finds us worthy of his love, when we masquerade in this costume; but then we can’t be ourselves, because we are too dressed up, and because men confuse us by kneeling in the dust and worshipping us instead of just taking us as we are and simply loving us.”

the stern lines about the closed mouth of the grave spoke of remorse.

It had been easy then to feel the beauty; but now that she was in the midst of it all, when every little feature stood out and spoke boldly with the manifold voices of reality, and beauty was shattered as light in a prism, she could not gather the rays together again, could not put the picture back beyond the sea.

that it was simpler to express his own doubts than to put them in the mouth of Gorm, Loki-worshipper, that it was more rational to find words for the mystic stirrings of his own being than to call to the cloister walls of the Middle Ages and hear his own voice come back to him as a faint echo.

And do you also remember how a structure rose in your thoughts from the yellowing leaves of books, complete and whole, reposing in itself as a work of art, and it was yours in every detail, and your spirit dwelt in it?

To learn is as beautiful as to live.

Here it was of flowers, not stock or roses or any other flower that can be named, but rather as one might fancy the scent of those fantastic, pale sapphire lilies that twine their blossoms around vases of old porcelain.

he had known her only from a terrible old family daguerreotype, where she appeared in a misty atmosphere, forming a group with her brother and her parents, all with hectic crimson on their cheeks and bright gilding on their jewelry.

Resignation comes to us as a temptress, luring us to forego the impossible and be content.

When I sit here and mope and don’t do anything and can’t do anything, then I actually feel the time slipping away from me. Hours and weeks and months rush past with nothing in them, and I can’t nail them to the spot with a piece of work.

When I paint a picture, the time I use for it remains mine forever; it isn’t lost, even though it’s past. I

There is nothing more wretched than to be an artist.

Here I am, strong and healthy; I have eyes to see; my blood is warm and red; my heart beats, and there is nothing the matter with my head, and I want to work, but I can’t.

“The new impressions! Exactly. Have you never heard about people who had plenty of talent in their first youth while they were fresh and full of hope and plans, but when youth had passed their talent was gone too—and never came back?”

And at last he died the death—the difficult death.