, a young man who, inspired by
Steffens, was becoming the foremost dramatic poet of Denmark. He even
renewed the study of his long neglected Bible. The motive of his
extensive reading was, no doubt, ethical rather than esthetic, a search
for that outside power of which the battle within him revealed his urgent
need. Thus he wrote:

My spirit opened its eyes,
Saw itself on the brink of the abyss,
Searched with trembling and fear
Everywhere for a power to save,
And found God in all things,
Found Him in the songs of the poets,
Found Him in the work of the sages,
Found Him in the myths of the North,
Found Him in the records of history,
But clearest of all it still
Found Him in the Book of Books.

The fate that appears to crush a man may also exalt him. And so it was
with Grundtvig. His suffering crushed the stony shell of cynical
indifference in which he had long enclosed his naturally warm and
impetuous spirit and released the great latent forces within him. In the
midst of his struggle, new ideas germinated springlike in his mind. He
read, thought and wrote, especially on the subject that was always near
to his heart, the mythology and early traditions of the Northern peoples.
And after three years of struggle, he was at last ready to break away
from Egelykke. If he had not yet conquered his passion, he had so far
mastered it that he could aspire to other things.

Thus ended what a modern Danish writer, Skovgaard-Petersen, calls "the
finest love story in Danish history." The event had caused Grundtvig much
pain, but it left no festering wounds. His firm refusal to permit his
passion to sully himself or degrade the woman he loved had, on the
contrary, made it one of the greatest incitations to good in his whole
life.

On his return to Copenhagen Grundtvig almost at once obtained a position
as teacher in history at Borch's Collegium for boys. His new position
satisfied him eminently by affording him a chance to work with his
favorite subject and to expand his other intellectual interests. He soon
made friends with a number of promising young intellectuals who, in turn,
introduced him to some of the outstanding intellectual and literary
lights of the country, and within a short while the list of his
acquaintances read like a Blue Book of the city's intelligentsia.

Although Grundtvig was still quite unknown except for a few articles in a
current magazine, there was so