Chapter 5 - Page 2

familiar life. My
intercourse with him was very instructive to me, and I felt that I had
one merciful judge more. I travelled in company with him to Naples,
where we dwelt together in one house.

In Rome I also became first acquainted with Thorwaldsen. Many years
before, when I had not long been in Copenhagen, and was walking through
the streets as a poor boy, Thorwaldsen was there too: that was on his
first return home. We met one another in the street. I knew that he was
a distinguished man in art; I looked at him, I bowed; he went on, and
then, suddenly turning round, came back to me, and said, "Where have I
seen you before? I think we know one another." I replied, "No, we do
not know one another at all." I now related this story to him in Rome;
he smiled, pressed my hand, and said, "Yet we felt at that time that we
should become good friends." I read Agnete to him; and that which
delighted me in his judgment upon it was the assertion, "It is just,"
said he, "as if I were walking at home in the woods, and heard the
Danish lakes;" and then he kissed me.

One day, when he saw how distressed I was, and I related to him about
the pasquinade which I had received from home in Paris, he gnashed his
teeth violently, and said, in momentary anger, "Yes, yes, I know the
people; it would not have gone any better with me if I had remained
there; I should then, perhaps, not even have obtained permission to set
up a model. Thank God that I did not need them, for then they know how
to torment and to annoy." He desired me to keep up a good heart, and
then things could not fail of going well; and with that he told me of
some dark passages in his own life, where he in like manner had been
mortified and unjustly condemned.

After the Carnival, I left Rome for Naples; saw at Capri the blue
Grotto, which was at that time first discovered; visited the temple at
Paestum, and returned in the Easter week to Rome, from whence I went
through Florence and Venice to Vienna and Munich; but I had at that
time neither mind nor heart for Germany; and when I thought on Denmark,
I felt fear and distress of mind about the bad reception which I
expected to find there. Italy, with its scenery and its people's life,
occupied my soul, and towards this land I felt a yearning. My earlier
life, and what I had now seen, blended themselves together into an
image--into poetry, which I was compelled to write down, although I was
convinced that it would occasion me more trouble than joy, if my
necessities at home should oblige me to print it. I had written already
in Rome the first chapter. It was my novel of "The Improvisatore."

At one of my first visits to the theatre