This wrought a change in the poetic tendency of Paludan-Müller. He paused suddenly in his flight from reality, wheeled about, and took the direction back to earth again. In the poem "Tithon" he paints life on the island of the morning dawn, on the coast of the sea of ether, to which the love of Aurora has uplifted Tithon. It is an existence such as that of Rinaldo in the enchanted gardens of Armida, and a veil of roseate hue is spread over all the surroundings, over the skies, as well as over the beautiful women of the island. It is a life passed amid song, clinking of goblets, love, and music, and sails on the sea of ether in eternal youth, during an eternal spring. And yet this life is never spiritless and insipid, nor are its enjoyments ever commonplace; they are blissful enjoyments. It is akin to the life of which so many noble enthusiasts among the Danish contemporaries of our poet dreamed; the life that hovered before Carsten Hauch, for instance, when he sang of that "sea of the milky way, where the spirits of the redeemed, freed from care and sorrow, their eyes illumined with the brilliant light of immortality, glide onward through unknown clouds." It is that _alibi_ of enjoyment that Ludwig Bödtcher and so many other similar artist natures, during the best years of their lives, sought beneath the skies of Italy; it is that never-ending spring and that eternal youth which Christian Winther and Hans Christian Andersen, and all those men of their generation who like themselves did not know how to grow old, permitted themselves to cling to and conjure up. It is a strong proof, however, of the greatness of Paludan-Müller's spirit that this life and this beauty did not long attract him. His poetic muse depicts Tithon, in the midst of his forgetfulness of earth and his revelling in enjoyment, devoured with half-unconscious yearning for his country, his people, his relations, and the entire un-ideal reality which he has forsaken. Nor is this yearning without foundation; for nothing less than Priam's ascension to the throne, the abduction of Helen, the ten-years' war of which Homer is supposed to have sung, and the complete destruction of Troy, has taken place while Tithon is revelling in the cloud-land of the morning dawn. Thus it was once upon a time, when the French Revolution was enacting from beginning to end its magnificent drama, that certain people on the coast of the Sound were singing drinking-songs and club-songs. Thus it was that Copenhagen played its private comedy during the battle of Waterloo, and Denmark rioted in beautiful verses and rejoiced in æsthetic tilting-matches while the July Revolution was in full blast. Paludan-Müller has his Tithon compel Aurora to give him permission to return to earth, and the following words uttered by Tithon at the moment when, after long absence, he once more sets foot upon earth, indicate perhaps the most significant turning-point of the poet's own course of development--