Magdalene Thoresen was spending that year in Copenhagen, and our
connection, which had been kept up by correspondence, brought with it a
lively mutual interchange of thoughts and impressions. Our natures, it
is true, were as much unlike as it was possible for them to be; but
Magdalene Thoresen's wealth of moods and the overflowing warmth of her
heart, the vivacity of her disposition, the tenderness that filled her
soul, and the incessant artistic exertion, which her exhausted body
could not stand, all this roused in me a sympathy that the mistiness of
her reasoning, and the over-excitement of her intellectual life, could
not diminish. Besides which, especially when she was away from
Copenhagen, but when she was there, too, she needed a literary
assistant who could look through her MSS. and negotiate over them with
the publishers of anthologies, year-books, and weekly papers, and for
this purpose she not infrequently seized upon me, innocently convinced,
like everybody else for that matter, that she was the only person who
made a similar demand upon me.
Still, it was rather trying that, when my verdict on her work did not
happen to be what she wished, she saw in what I said an unkindness, for
which she alleged reasons that had nothing whatever to do with Art.
Magdalene Thoresen could not be otherwise than fond of Rasmus Nielsen;
they were both lively, easily enraptured souls, who breathed most
freely in the fog. That, however, did not come between her and me, whom
she often thought in the right. With regard to my newspaper activity,
she merely urged the stereotyped but pertinent opinion, that I ought
not to write so many small things; my nature could not stand this
wasting, drop by drop.
I had myself felt for a long time that I ought to concentrate my forces
on larger undertakings.