Yet while the poet's task had thus become individualized, and had acquired defined boundary lines in time and space, it none the less aimed at universality. Adam Homo--that was meant, as the title itself indicated, to represent man in general, and the hero was no less typical than the poet's previous mythical heroes. He is in the main a mythical form; his history is the mythical biography of the Danish bourgeoisie. There was one expression that kept continually recurring in the discourse of Paludan-Müller when he spoke of science or art, and that expression was "great tasks." In these words were comprised his claims upon himself and his fellow-laborers. He himself always sought out great tasks, because it was his firm belief that they alone develop the powers and are worthy of an effort of strength, and he was continually encouraging us, his younger fellow-laborers, to set ourselves the task of dealing with great problems, because only through the solution of such could our work win a permanent place in literature. "There is," said he, "in all literatures more than enough that is scattered to the winds like chaff; make it your task to attempt something that will endure, something that has a future before it." The surest means of attaining this end was, in his estimation, in his own art, the endeavor to represent, in the characters and destinies of the individual personalities, the type of universal humanity. Those poets, in whose efforts the casual plays a certain rôle, will not attain so high a plane, it is true, yet will often acquire, by way of compensation, a more volatile, more sportive life, a more captivating charm; for the accidental in poetic art is synonymous with the _bizarre,_ the gracefully surprising, the incalculable, and yet so natural irregularity. In the choice of his plots Paludan-Müller is to a rare degree the enemy of chance. His perception of what is fundamentally human, no less than his lack of original creative genius, prevented him from ever selecting psychologically singular subjects. The race of the normal _homo sapiens,_ in its entire folly, was the sole material that possessed for him a thorough power of attraction. In "Adam Homo," the task the poet set himself was to show how a man, taken from the masses, and equipped with neither the best nor the poorest endowments, from youth up, a man as full of ideal hopes and resolutions as his betters, can squander his entire intellectual fortune, and finally end as a spiritless, narrow-minded old fogy. At the same time he wished to portray how the hero for every degree he descended in the intellectual and moral scale, was compelled, of a necessity, to climb one round higher in the social ladder. Paludan-Müller was little inclined to throw any light on the history of his works; but when once, without any preliminary, I asked, "What part of 'Adam Homo' did you write first?" he replied, unhesitatingly, "The epitaph,"--the only lines in the poem that are printed in italics.