Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/231

Rh to the public by. He was the son of a rigorously puritanic priest, and was born in Copenhagen on the 18th of November, 1743. In his eleventh year, immediately after the death of his father, he was sent to Slesvig, where an old, pedantic rector was charged with the difficult task of educating the merry, vivacious boy, in whose soul were already dawning the many-hued images of poetry. While yet a mere boy his imagination was so vivid that it at times utterly overpowered him and carried him away. Thus when only thirteen years old he once ran away from the house of his tutor with the intention of going to Holland. From there he was going to Batavia, trusting that a favorable destiny would cause him to be shipwrecked and cast him on some deserted island. He had just been reading Robinson Crusoe. When the seven years' war broke out he was seized with an irresistible desire of becoming a soldier, and life in Slesvig, with its scholastic drudgery, became unendurable to him. In order to be released from this thraldom and to be allowed to enter the military academy, he wrote a letter to his mother relating a dream that he fancied he had had, in which an angel had appeared to him with a sword in one hand and a pen in the other, and the angel had asked him which of the two he preferred; and then, when as a dutiful son he had seized hold of the pen, the angel had frowned on him. But this expedient availed him nothing, and in his fifteenth year he became a student at Copenhagen. Here occurred an event which suddenly gave a new turn to his life. He made the acquaintance of a beautiful young girl, by name Arense Hulegaard, a relative of his step-father, and his youthful heart was at once kindled with an ardent love which only became extinct with his death. Realizing that if he continued the study of theology, which he had begun, at least ten years would elapse before he could obtain his beloved, there again awoke in him his old dreams of military renown and fortune. Without communicating his plans to anyone, and without taking formal leave, the sixteen-year-old youth left his home to