"O Earth, thy air is heavy! Like a burden It falls upon my limbs and on my bosom; A deadly weight, it presses on my shoulders. Unfriendly is thy greeting--cold and sharp, To meet me sendest thou thy wind inclement, And in thy winter garb hast clad thyself. Where'er I gaze, thy plains look bare and dreary; The leaves upon thy trees are sere and yellow; Thy grass is withered; decked hast thou already Yon hill-tops far away with wreaths of snow. Wilt thou alarm me? Is so stern thy visage? Because in utter folly I forsook thee? All hail to thee, O thou, my native soil! With this fond kiss my tears of joy I tender! Thou fill'st my heart e'en tho' thou'rt bare and dreary." The territory here trodden by Paludan-Müller with Tithon is the territory of Adam Homo. At the moment when the atmosphere of earth weighs heavily on Tithon's shoulders, Paludan-Müller once more hails Gaia. He had at that time already completed the first part of "Adam Homo." VI. "This is flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood," Paludan-Müller's contemporaries might have exclaimed when "Adam Homo" appeared. The same poet who in youth had painted nebulous images in the clouds, and who as an old man, having returned to the standpoint of his youth, wrote: "People demand flesh and blood of poetry; flesh and blood are to be found in the slaughter-houses; of the poetic art sentiment and soul alone should be required"--this same poet, in the meridian of his manhood, gave to his contemporaries and to posterity the truest, most lifelike poem Danish literature, up to that time, had produced,--a work whose hero, far from resembling its author's former heroes, who were simply poetically clad thoughts, was the reader's own brother, a being whose character is a cruel satire. Like Shylock's pound of flesh, the book was cut from the spot nearest the heart of the living generation, with the knife of inexorable moral law.