Niels Lyhne (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Niels Lyhne To the student of Jens Peter Jacobsen's life and works, Niels Lyhne has a value apart from its greatness as literature from the fact that it is the book in which the author recorded his own spiritual struggles and embodied the faith on which he came, finally, to rest his soul in death as in life. It tells of his early dreams and ideals, his efforts to know and to achieve, his revolt against the dream-swathed dogmas in which people take refuge from harsh reality, and his brave acceptance of what he conceived to be the truth, however dreary and bitter. The person of the hero is marked for a self-portrait by the description,"Niels Lyhne of Lon-borggaard, who was twenty-three years old, walked with a slight stoop, had beautiful hands and small ears, and was a little timid," - though friends of Jacobsen's youth declare that "a little timid" was far from describing the excessive shyness from which he suffered. He himself would sometimes joke about his "North Cimbrian heaviness," for like Niels Lyhne he was a native of Jutland, where the people are more sluggish than the sprightly islanders. Like him, again, he had a mother who kept alive her romantic spirit in rather humdrum, prosaic surroundings, and who instilled into her son's mind from childhood the idea that he was to be a poet. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.