Removal of Family to Stockholm 63 If the crops threatened to fail, she was in despair, as that might be the blow which would deprive them of Sundsholm. She once said: "To live in the country, till the soil, never leave it—from the time I began to think this was the determining factor in myemotional life, and the modem movement back to the soil is one in which my heart has always been. Among her extremely few poetic attempts is a poem' about a stream which was appro- priated for commercial purposes, and would thus deprive coming generations of the beauty which had gladdened her. The real incident which inspired the poem was the draining of a lake, which caused her years of regret in her youth with nights of weeping and days of aching sorrow. Most people found such sor- row too absurd to deserve interest or sympathy, but those who have begun to care for the culti- vation of beauty will perceive that Ellen Key was not understood, simply because she was ahead of her time, as she also was when she wrote down her thoughts on '* Cultivation of the Art of Living" twenty years before she had heard others express such views. • Published in Tidsknft for Hemmet, 1874.