LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

fairy-tale quality with which they overwhelm the reader at
the start.

One only enjoys them ever increasingly, becomes more
grateful and somehow better and simpler in one’s gazing, deeper
in one’s believing of life, and in life greater and more blessed.—

And later you must read the wonderful book of the destiny
and longing of Marie Grubbe and Jacobsen’s letters and diaries
and fragments, and finally his verses, which (even though they
are only moderately well translated) live in everlasting sound.
(To that end I would advise you to buy, when you get the
chance, the lovely complete edition of Jacobsen’s works, which
contains all the above. It appeared in three volumes, well
translated, published by Eugen Dietrichs of Leipzig, and costs,
I rather think, only five or six marks a volume.)

Your opinion of There should have been roses there® . . . (that
work of such incomparable delicacy and form) is of course, in
contrast with that expressed in the introduction, quite, quite
unimpeachably correct. And let me here at once request you :
read as few aesthetic-critical things as possible,—they are cither
partisan opinions, become hardened and meaningless in their
lifeless petrifaction, or else they are a skilful play upon words,
in which one view is uppermost today and its opposite tomorrow.
Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less
likely to bring us near to them than criticism. Only love can
apprehend and hold them, and can be just towards them.—
Decide each time according to yourself and your feelings in the
face of every such declaration, discussion or introduction; if
you should still be wrong, the natural growth of your inner
life will lead you slowly in the course of time to other per-
ceptions. Let your judgments have their own quiet, undisturbed
development, which must, like all progress, come from deep
within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried. It means
everything to carry for the full time and then to bring forth.
To allow every impression and every germ of a feeling to grow
to completion wholly in yourself, in the darkness, in the unutter-

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