For nearly ten years I went to one and the same school. I came to know
the way there and back, to and from the three different places, all
near together, where my parents lived during the time, as I knew no
other. In that part of the town, all about the Round Tower, I knew, not
only every house, but every archway, every door, every window, every
Paving-stone. It all gradually imprinted itself so deeply upon me that
in after years, when gazing on foreign sights and foreign towns, even
after I had been living for a long time in the same place, I had a
curious feeling that, however beautiful and fascinating it all might
be, or perhaps for that very reason, it was dreamland, unreality, which
would one day elude me and vanish; reality was the Round Tower in
Copenhagen and all that lay about it. It was ugly, and altogether
unattractive, but it was reality. That you always found again.
Similarly, though in a somewhat different sense, the wooded landscape
in the neighbourhood of Copenhagen, to be exact, the view over the
Hermitage Meadows down to the Sound, as it appears from the bench
opposite the Slesvig Stone, the first and dearest type of landscape
beauty with which I became acquainted, was endowed to me with an
imprint of actuality which no other landscape since, be it never so
lovely or never so imposing, has ever been able to acquire.