happens, we will remember that the straws have told it before-hand."
"I will keep these four straws, bound in a prophetic wreath for
victory and peace!" said the stranger; "and if the oracle speaks
truth, then I will draw the whole picture for you, as we sit here
under the hanging birch by the lake, and look on Zäther's blue
mountains, each of us binding straw to straw."
A red mark was made in the almanack; it was the 6th of July, 1849. The
same day a red page was written in Denmark's history. The Danish
soldier made a red, victorious mark with his blood, at the battle of
Fredericia.
THE POET'S SYMBOL.
* * * * *
If a man would seek for the symbol of the poet, he need not look
farther than "The Arabian Nights' Tales." Scherezade who interprets
the stories for the Sultan--Scherezade is the poet, and the Sultan is
the public who is to be agreeably entertained, or else he will
decapitate Scherezade.
Powerful Sultan! Poor Scherezade!
The Sultan-public sits in more than a thousand and one forms, and
listens. Let us regard a few of these forms.
There sits a sallow, peevish, scholar; the tree of his life bears
leaves impressed with long and learned words: diligence and
perseverance crawl like snails on the hog's leather bark: the moths
have got into the inside--and that is bad, very bad! Pardon the rich
fulness of the song, the inconsiderate enthusiasm, the fresh young,
intellect. Do not behead Scherezade! But he beheads her out of hand,
_sans_ remorse.
There sits a dress-maker, a sempstress who has had some experience of
the world. She comes from strange families, from a solitary chamber
where she sat and gained a knowledge of mankind--she knows and loves
the romantic. Pardon, Miss, if the story has not excitement enough for
you, who have sat over the needle and the muslin, and having had so
much of life's prose, gasp after romance.
"Behead her!" says the dress-maker.
There sits a figure in a dressing gown--this oriental dress of the
North, for the lordly minion, the petty prince, the rich brewer's son,
&c., &c., &c. It is not to be learned from the dressing gown, nor from
that lordly look and the fine smile around the mouth, to what stem he
belongs: his demands on Scherezade are just the same as the
dress-maker's: he must be excited, he must be brought to shudder all
down the vertebrae, through the very spine: he must be crammed with
mysteries, such as those which Spriez knew how to connect and thicken.
Scherezade is beheaded!
Wise, enlightened Sultan! Thou comest in the form of a schoolboy; thou
bearest the Romans and Greeks together in a satchel on thy back, as
Atlas sustained the world. Do not cast an evil eye upon poor
Scherezade; do not judge her before thou hast learned thy lesson, and
art a child again,--do not behead Scherezade!
Young, full-dressed diplomatist, on whose breast we can count, by the
badges of honour, how many courts thou hast visited with thy princely
master, speak mildly of Scherezade's name! speak of her in French,
that she may be ennobled above her mother tongue! translate but one
strophe of her song, as badly as thou canst, but carry it into the
brilliant saloon, and her sentence of death is annulled in the sweet,
absolving _charmant_!
Mighty annihilator and elevator!--the newspapers' Zeus--thou weekly,
monthly, and daily journals' Jupiter, shake not thy locks in anger!
Cast not thy lightnings forth, if Scherezade sing otherwise than thou
art accustomed to in thy family, or if she go without a _suite_ of
thine own clique. Do not behead her!
We will see one figure more--the most dangerous of them all; he with
the praise on his lips, like that of the stormy river's swell--the
blind enthusiast. The water in which Scherezade dipped her fingers, is
for him a fountain of Castalia; the throne he erects to her apotheosis
becomes her scaffold.
This is the poet's symbol--paint it:
"THE SULTAN AND SCHEREZADE."
But why none of the worthier figures--the candid, the honest, and the
beautiful? They come also, and on them Scherezade fixes her eye.
Encouraged by them, she boldly raises her proud head aloft towards the
stars, and sings of the harmony there above, and here beneath, in
man's heart.
_That_ will not clearly show the symbol:
"THE SULTAN AND SCHEREZADE."
The sword of death hangs over her head whilst she relates--and the
Sultan-figure bids us expect that it will fall. Scherezade is the
victor: the poet is, like her, also a victor. He is rich,
victorious--even in his poor chamber, in his most solitary hours.
There, in that chamber, rose after rose shoots forth; bubble after
bubble sparkles on the magic stream. The heavens shine with shooting
stars, as if a new firmament were created, and the old rolled away.
The world does not know it, for it is the poet's own creation, richer
than the king's costly illuminations. He is happy, as Scherezade is;
he is victorious, he is mighty. _Imagination_ adorns his walls with
tapestry, such as no land's ruler owns; _feeling_ makes the beauteous
chords sound to him from the human breast; _understanding_ raises him,
through the magnificence of creation, up to God, without his
forgetting that he stands fast on the firm earth. He is mighty, he is
happy, as few are. We will not place him in the stocks of
misconstruction, for pity and lamentation; we merely paint his symbol,
dip into the colours on the world's least attractive side, and obtain
it most comprehensibly from
"THE SULTAN AND SCHEREZADE."
See--that is it! Do not behead Scherezade!
THE DAL-ELV.
* * * * *
Before Homer sang there were heroes; but they are not known; no poet
celebrated their fame. It is just so with the beauties of nature, they
must be brought into notice by words and delineations, be brought
before the eyes of the multitude; get a sort of world's patent for
what they are, and then they may be said first to exist. The elvs of
the north have rushed and whirled along for thousands of years in
unknown beauty. The world's great highroad does take this direction;
no steam-packet conveys the traveller comfortably along the streams of
the Dal-elvs; fall on fall makes sluices indispensable and invaluable.
Schubert is as yet the only stranger who has written about the wild
magnificence and southern beauty of Dalecarlia, and spoken of its
greatness.
Clear as the waves of the sea does the mighty elv stream in endless
windings through forest deserts and varying plains, sometimes
extending its deep bed, sometimes confining it, reflecting the bending
trees and the red painted block houses of solitary towns, and
sometimes rushing like a cataract over immense blocks of rock.
Miles apart from one another, out of the ridge of mountains between
Sweden and Norway, come the east and west Dal-elvs, which first become
confluent and have one bed above Bålstad. They have taken up rivers
and lakes in their waters. Do but visit this place! here are pictorial
riches to be found; the most picturesque landscapes, dizzyingly grand,
smilingly pastoral--idyllic: one is drawn onward up to the very source
of the elv, the bubbling well above Finman's hut: one feels a desire
to follow every branch of the stream that the river takes in.
The first mighty fall, Njupeskoers cataract, is seen by the Norwegian
frontier in Sernasog. The mountain stream rushes perpendicularly from
the rock to a depth of seventy fathoms.
We pause in the dark forest, where the elv seems to collect within
itself nature's whole deep gravity. The stream rolls its clear waters
over a porphyry soil where the mill-wheel is driven, and the gigantic
porphyry bowls and sarcophagi are polished.
We follow the stream through Siljan's lake, where superstition sees
the water-sprite swim, like the sea-horse with a mane of green
sea-weed, and where the aërial images present visions of witchcraft in
the warm summer days.
We sail on the stream from Siljan's lake, under the weeping willows of
the parsonage, where the swans assemble in flocks; we glide along
slowly with horses and carriages on the great ferry-boat, away over
the rapid current under Bålstad's picturesque shore. Here the elv
widens and rolls its billows majestically in a woodland landscape, as
large and extended as if it were in North America.
We see the rushing, rapid stream under Avista's yellow clay
declivities: the yellow water falls like fluid amber in picturesque
cataracts before the copper-works, where rainbow-coloured tongues of
fire shoot themselves upwards, and the hammer's blows on the copper
plates resound to the monotonous, roaring rumble of the elv-fall.
And now, as a concluding passage of splendour in the life of the
Dal-elvs, before they lose themselves in the waters of the Baltic, is
the view of Elvkarleby Fall. Schubert compares it with the fall of
Schafhausen; but we must remember, that the Rhine there has not such a
mass of water as that which rushes down Elvkarleby.
Two and a half Swedish miles from Gefle, where the high road to Upsala
goes over the Dal-elv, we see from the walled bridge, which we pass
over, the whole of that immense fall. Close up to the bridge, there is
a house where the bridge toll is paid. There the stranger can pass the
night, and from his little window look over the falling waters, see
them in the clear moonlight, when darkness has laid itself to rest
within the thicket of oaks and firs, and all the effect of light is in
those foaming, flowing waters, and see them when the morning sun
stretches his rainbow in the trembling spray, like an airy bridge of
colours, from the shore to the wood-grown rock in the centre of the
cataract.
We came hither from Gefle, and saw at a great distance on the way, the
blue clouds from the broken, rising spray, ascend above the dark-green
tops of the trees. The carriage stopped near the bridge; we stepped
out, and close before us fell the whole redundant elv.
The painter cannot give us the true, living image of a waterfall on
canvas--the movement is wanting; how can one describe it in words,
delineate this majestic grandeur, brilliancy of colour, and arrowy
flight? One cannot do it; one may however attempt it; get together, by
little and little, with words, an outline of that mirrored image which
our eye gave us, and which even the strongest remembrance can only
retain--if not vaguely, dubiously.
The Dal-elv divides itself into three branches above the fall: the two
enclose a wood-grown rocky island, and rush down round its smooth-worn
stony wall. The one to the right of these two falls is the finer; the
third branch makes a circuit, and comes again to the main stream,
close outside the united fall; here it dashes out as if to meet or
stop the others, and is now hurried along in boiling eddies with the
arrowy stream, which rushes on foaming against the walled pillars that
bear the bridge, as if it would tear them away along with it.
The landscape to the left was enlivened by a herd of goats, that were
browsing amongst the hazel bushes. They ventured quite out to the very
edge of the declivity, as they were bred here and accustomed to the
hollow, thundering rumble of the water. To the right, a flock of
screaming birds flew over the magnificent oaks. Cars, each with one
horse, and with the driver standing upright in it, the reins in his
hand, came on the broad forest road from Oens Brück.
Thither we will go in order to take leave of the Dal-elv at one of the
most delightful of places, which vividly removes the stranger, as it
were, into a far more southern land, into a far richer nature, than he
supposed was to be found here. The road is so pretty--the oak grows
here so strong and vigorously with mighty crowns of rich foliage.
Oens Brück lies in a delightfully pastoral situation. We came thither;
here was life and bustle indeed! The mill-wheels went round; large
beams were sawn through; the iron forged on the anvil, and all by
water-power. The houses of the workmen form a whole town: it is a long
street with red-painted wooden houses, under picturesque oaks, and
birch trees. The greensward was as soft as velvet to look at, and up
at the manor-house, which rises in front of the garden like a little
palace, there was, in the rooms and saloon, everything that the
English call comfort.
We did not find the host at home; but hospitality is always the
house-fairy here. We had everything good and homely. Fish and wild
fowl were placed before us, steaming and fragrant, and almost as
quickly as in beautiful enchanted palaces. The garden itself was a
piece of enchantment. Here stood three transplanted beech-trees, and
they throve well. The sharp north wind had rounded off the tops of the
wild chesnut-trees of the avenue in a singular manner: they looked as
if they had been under the gardener's shears. Golden-yellow oranges
hung in the conservatory; the splendid southern exotics had to-day got
the windows half open, so that the artificial warmth met the fresh,
warm, sunny air of the northern summer.
That branch of the Dal-elv which goes round the garden is strewn with
small islands, where beautiful hanging birches and fir-trees grow in
Scandinavian splendour. There are small islands with green, silent
groves; there are small islands with rich grass, tall brackens,
variegated bell-flowers, and cowslips--no Turkey carpet has fresher
colours. The stream between these islands and holms is sometimes
rapid, deep, and clear; sometimes like a broad rivulet with
silky-green rushes, water-lilies, and brown-feathered reeds; sometimes
it is a brook with a stony ground, and now it spreads itself out in a
large, still mill-dam.
Here is a landscape in Midsummer for the games of the river-sprites,
and the dancers of the elves and fairies! Here, in the lustre of the
full moon, the dryads can tell their tales, the water-sprite seize the
golden harp, and believe that one can be blessed, at least for one
single night like this.
On the other side of Oens Brück is the main stream--the full Dal-elv.
Do you hear the monotonous rumble? it is not from Elvkarleby Fall that
it reaches hither; it is close by; it is from Laa-Foss, in which lies
Ash Island: the elv streams and rushes over the leaping salmon.
Let us sit here, between the fragments of rock by the shore, in the
red evening sunlight, which sheds a golden lustre on the waters of the
Dal-elv.
Glorious river! But a few seconds' work hast thou to do in the mills
yonder, and thou rushest foaming on over Elvkarleby's rocks, down into
the deep bed of the river, which leads thee to the Baltic--thy
eternity.
DANEMORA.
* * * * *
Reader, do you know what giddiness is? Pray that she may not seize
you, this mighty "Loreley" of the heights, this evil-genius from the
land of the sylphides; she whizzes around her prey, and whirls it into
the abyss. She sits on the narrow rocky path, close by the steep
declivity, where no tree, no branch is found, where the wanderer must
creep close to the side of the rock, and look steadily forward. She
sits on the church spire and nods to the plumber who works on his
swaying scaffold; she glides into the illumined saloon, and up to the
nervous, solitary one, in the middle of the bright polished floor, and
it sways under him--the walls vanish from him.
Her fingers touch one of the hairs of our head, and we feel as if the
air had left us, and we were in a vacuum.
We met with her at Danemora's immense gulf, whither we came on broad,
smooth, excellent high-roads, through the fresh forest. She sat on the
extreme edge of the rocky wall, above the abyss, and kicked at the tun
with her thin, awl-like legs, as it hung in iron chains on large
beams, from the tower-high corner of the bridge by the precipice.
The traveller raised his foot over the abyss, and set it on the tun,
into which one of the workmen received him, and held him; and the
chains rattled; the pulleys turned; the tun sank slowly, hovering
through the air. But he felt the descent; he felt it through his bones
and marrow; through all the nerves. Her icy breath blew in his neck,
and down the spine, and the air itself became colder and colder. It
seemed to him as if the rocks grew over his head, always higher and
higher: the tun made a slight swinging, but he felt it, like a fall--a
fall in sleep, that shock in the blood. Did it go quicker downwards,
or was it going up again? He could not distinguish by the sensation.
The tun touched the ground, or rather the snow--the dirty trodden,
eternal snow, down to which no sunbeam reaches, which no summer warmth
from above ever melts. A hollow sound was heard from within the dark,
yawning cavern, and a thick vapour rolled out into the cold air. The
stranger entered the dark halls; there seemed to be a crashing above
him: the fire burned; the furnaces roared; the beating of hammers
sounded; the watery damps dripped down--and he again entered the tun,
which was hoven up in the air. He sat with closed eyes, but giddiness
breathed on his head, and on his breast; his inwardly-turned eye
measured the giddy depth through the tun: "It is appalling," said he.
"Appalling!" echoed the brave and estimable stranger, whom we met at
Danemora's great gulf. He was a man from Scania, consequently from the
same street as the Sealander--if the Sound be called a street
(strait). "But, however, one can say one has been down there," said
he, and he pointed to the gulf; "right down, and up again; but it is
no pleasure at all."
"But why descend at all?" said I. "Why will men do these things?"
"One must, you know, when one comes here," said he. "The plague of
travelling is, that one must see everything: one would not have it
supposed otherwise. It is a shame to a man, when he gets home again,
not to have seen everything, that others ask him about."
"If you have no desire, then let it alone. See what pleases you on
your travels. Go two paces nearer than where you stand, and become
quite giddy: you will then have formed some conception of the passage
downward. I will hold you fast, and describe the rest of it for you."
And I did so, and the perspiration sprang from his forehead.
"Yes, so it is: I apprehend it all," said he: "I am clearly sensible
of it."
I described the dirty grey snow covering, which the sun's warmth never
thaws; the cold down there, and the caverns, and the fire, and the
workmen, &c.
"Yes; one should be able to tell all about it," said he. "That _you_
can, for you have seen it."
"No more than you," said I. "I came to the gulf; I saw the depth, the
snow below, the smoke that rolled out of the caverns; but when it was
time I should get into the tun--no, thank you. Giddiness tickled me
with her long, awl-like legs, and so I stayed where I was I have felt
the descent, through the spine and the soles of the feet, and that as
well as any one: the descent is the pinch. I have been in the Hartz,
under Rammelsberg; glided, as on Russian mountains, at Hallein,
through the mountain, from the top down to the salt-works; wandered
about in the catacombs of Rome and Malta: and what does one see in the
deep passages? Gloom--darkness! What does one feel? Cold, and a sense
of oppression--a longing for air and light, which is by far the best;
and that we have now."
"But nevertheless, it is so very remarkable!" said the man; and he
drew forth his "Hand-book for Travellers in Sweden," from which he
read: "Danemora's iron-works are the oldest, largest, and richest in
Sweden; the best in Europe. They have seventy-nine openings, of which
seventeen only are being worked. The machine mine is ninety-three
fathoms deep."
Just then the bells sounded from below: it was the signal that the
time of labour for that day was ended. The hue of eve still shone on
the tops of the trees above; but down in that deep, far-extended gulf,
it was a perfect twilight. Thence, and out of the dark caverns, the
workmen swarmed forth. They looked like flies, quite small in the
space below: they scrambled up the long ladders, which hung from the
steep sides of the rocks, in separate landing-places: they climbed
higher and higher--upwards, upwards--and at every step they became
larger. The iron chains creaked in the scaffolding of beams, and three
or four young fellows stood in their wooden shoes on the edge of the
tun; chatted away right merrily, and kicked with their feet against
the side of the rock, so that they swung from it: and it became darker
and darker below; it was as if the deep abyss became still deeper!
"It is appalling!" said the man from Scania. "One ought, however, to
have gone down there, if it were only to swear that one _had_ been.
You, however, have certainly been down there," said he again to me.
"Believe what you will," I replied; and I say the same to the reader.
THE SWINE.
* * * * *
That capital fellow, Charles Dickens, has told us about the swine, and
since then it puts us into a good humour whenever we hear even the
grunt of one. Saint Anthony has taken them under his patronage, and if
we think of the "prodigal son," we are at once in the midst of the
sty, and it was just before such a one that our carriage stopped in
Sweden. By the high road, closely adjoining his house, the peasant had
his sty, and that such a one as there is probably scarcely its like in
the world. It was an old state-carriage, the seats were taken out of
it, the wheels taken off, and thus it stood, without further ceremony,
on its own bottom, and four swine were shut in there. If these were
the first that had been in it one could not determine; but that it was
once a state-carriage everything about it bore witness, even to the
strip of morocco that hung from the roof inside, all bore witness of
better days. It is true, every word of it.
"Uff," said the occupiers within, and the carriage creaked and
complained--it was a sorrowful end it had come to.
"The beautiful is past!" so it sighed; so it said, or it might have
said so.
We returned here in the autumn. The carriage, or rather the body of
the carriage, stood in its old place, but the swine were gone: they
were lords in the forests; rain and drizzle reigned there; the wind
tore the leaves off all the trees, and allowed them neither rest nor
quiet: the birds of passage were gone.
"The beautiful is past!" said the carriage, and the same sigh passed
through the whole of nature, and from the human heart it sounded: "The
beautiful is past! with the delightful green forest, with the warm
sunshine, and the song of birds--past! past!" So it said, and so it
creaked in the trunks of the tall trees, and there was heard a sigh,
so inwardly deep, a sigh direct from the heart of the wild rose-bush,
and he who sat there was the rose-king. Do you know him! he is of a
pure breed, the finest red-green breed: he is easily known. Go to the
wild rose hedges, and in autumn, when all the flowers are gone, and
the red hips alone remain, one often sees amongst these a large
red-green moss-flower: that is the rose-king. A little green leaf
grows out of his head--that is his feather: he is the only male person
of his kind on the rose-bush, and he it was who sighed.
"Past! past! the beautiful is past! The roses are gone; the leaves of
the trees fall off!--it is wet here, and it is cold and raw!--The
birds that sang here are now silent; the swine live on acorns; the
swine are lords in the forest!"
They were cold nights, they were gloomy days; but the raven sat on the
bough and croaked nevertheless: "brah, brah!" The raven and the crow
sat on the topmost bough: they have a large family, and they all said:
"brah, brah! caw, caw!" and the majority is always right.
There was a great miry pool under the tall trees in the hollow, and
here lay the whole herd of swine, great and small--they found the
place so excellent. "Oui! oui!" said they, for they knew no more
French, but that, however, was something. They were so wise, and so
fat, and altogether lords in the forest.