But for all that, the exultation of the storm was in their young souls. They had faith in the light of the great stars of thought; they had hope fath… - Jens Peter Jacobsen

He had been so busy decking himself with the qualities he lacked that he had not had time to take note of those he possessed, but now he began to piece his own self together from scattered memories and impressions of his childhood and from the most vivid moments of his life. He saw with pleased surprise how it all fitted together, bit by bit, and was welded into a much more familiar personality than the one he had chased after in his dreams. This figure was far more genuine, far stronger, and more richly endowed. It was no mere dead stump of an ideal, but a living thing, full of infinite shifting possibilities playing through it and shaping it to a thousand fold unity.

However high a mortal may set his throne, however firmly he may place upon his brow the tiara of exception that signifies genius, he can never be perfectly sure that he may not some day, like , be seized with the strange desire to go on all-fours and eat grass with the meanest beasts of the field.

So Niels grows up, and all the influences of his childhood work on the plastic clay. Everything helps to shape it; everything is significant, the real and the dreamed, what is known and what is foreshadowed — all add their touch, lightly but surely, to that tracery of lines which is destined to be first hollowed out and deepened and afterwards flattened out and smoothed away.