The next ventures of the
versatile and indefatigable poet were the novel "The Two Baronesses"
(1849), and the fairy comedies "More than Pearls and Gold" (1849),
adapted from a German original, "The Sandman"[23] (1850), and "The Elder
Tree Mother" (1851). The comedies "He was not Born" (1864), "On
Langebro" and "When the Spaniards were Here" (1869), complete the cycle
of his dramatic labors. But the most amusing thing he did, showing how
incapable he was of taking the measure of his faculties, was to write a
novel, "To Be or Not to Be" (1857), in which he proposed once and
forever to down the giant Unbelief, prove the immortality of the soul,
and produce "peace and reconciliation between Nature and the Bible." It
was nothing less than the evidences of Christianity in novelistic form
with which he designed to favor an expectant world. "If[24] I can solve
this problem," he naively wrote to a friend, "then the monster
materialism, devouring everything divine, will die." But rarely was a
bigger Gulliver tackled by a tinier Liliputian.
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