I had lived so little with Nature. The Spring of 1865, the first Spring
I had spent in the country--although quite near to Copenhagen--meant to
me rich impressions of nature that I never forgot, a long chain of the
most exquisite Spring memories. I understood as I had never done before
the inborn affection felt by every human being for the virgin, the
fresh, the untouched, the not quite full-blown, just as it is about to
pass over into its maturity. It was in the latter half of May. I was
looking for anemones and violets, which had not yet gone to seed. The
budding beech foliage, the silver poplar with its shining leaves, the
maple with its blossoms, stirred me, filled me with Spring rapture. I
could lie long in the woods with my gaze fastened on a light-green
branch with the sun shining through it, and, as if stirred by the wind,
lighted up from different sides, and floating and flashing as if coated
with silver. I saw the empty husks fall by the hundred before the wind.
I followed up the streams in the wood to their sources. For a while a
rivulet oozed slowly along. Then came a little fall, and it began to
speak, to gurgle and murmur; but only at this one place, and here it
seemed to me to be like a young man or woman of twenty. Now that I, who
in my boyhood's days had gone for botanical excursions with my master
and school-fellows, absorbed myself in every plant, from greatest to
least, without wishing to arrange or classify any, it seemed as though
an infinite wisdom in Nature were being revealed to me for the first
time.
As near to Copenhagen as Söndermarken, stood the beech, with its curly
leaves and black velvet buds in their silk jackets. In the gardens of
Frederiksberg Avenue, the elder exhaled its fragrance, but was soon
over; the hawthorn sprang out in all its splendour. I was struck by the
loveliness of the chestnut blooms. When the blossom on the cherry-trees
had withered, the lilac was out, and the apple and pear-trees paraded
their gala dress.
It interested me to notice how the colour sometimes indicated the
shape, sometimes produced designs quite independently of it. I loitered
in gardens to feast my eyes on the charming grouping of the rhubarb
leaves no less than on the exuberance of their flowers, and the leaves
of the scorzonera attracted my attention, because they all grew in one
plane, but swung about like lances.
And as my habit was, I philosophised over what I saw and had made my
own, and I strove to understand in what beauty consisted. I considered
the relations between beauty and life; why was it that artificial
flowers and the imitation of a nightingale's song were so far behind
their originals in beauty? What was the difference between the beauty
of the real, the artificial and the painted flower? Might not Herbart's
Aesthetics be wrong, in their theory of form? The form itself might be
the same in Nature and the imitation, in the rose made of velvet and
the rose growing in the garden. And I reflected on the connection
between the beauty of the species and that of the individual. Whether a
lily be a beautiful flower, I can say without ever having seen lilies
before, but whether it be a beautiful lily, I cannot. The individual
can only be termed beautiful when more like than unlike to the ideal of
the species. And I mused over the translation of the idea of beauty
into actions and intellectual conditions. Was not the death of Socrates
more beautiful than his preservation of Alcibiades' life in
battle?--though this was none the less a beautiful act.