Childhood and Early Youth 23 thea. We have it from her own lips that when she read this poem for the second time at sixteen, kneeling by the window to catch the last light of the day, as it grew too dark, without moving from the spot she reached for the candle, and, lighting it, kept on reading on her knees, finishing without interruption the whole poem, which expressed, as it were, her own early love of the wholesome, harmonious life. Her first thought of love had been awakened through her reading of Tegner's Axel och Maria which she carried in her pocket all winter, and learned by heart at the age of seven. But her own dream of Love was quite idyllic. Her own home should be a country estate where everything would be arranged as perfectly as possible, from cellar to attic, and all the tenants happy with their own pretty cottages and gardens. And she would have two boys and two girls, both wondrously beautiful, and brought up only in love! On the brown wall-paper by her bed she had sketched the contours of her kingdom, a little "Utopia" in which she fancied herself riding about in a white dress on a white pony, symbols of the peace that would reign,—to lighten taxes, found schools, promote indus- tries, make all officials just, and all soldiers