collected in Mogens og andre Noveller (1882, translated as Mogens and Other Tales, 1921, and Mogens and Other Stories, 1994). Among them must be mentioned Mogens (1872, his official debut), the tale of a young dreamer and his maturing during love, sorrow and new hope of love. Et Skud i Taagen (A Shot in the Fog) is a Poe-inspired tale of the sterility of hatred and revenge. Pesten i Bergamo (The Plague of Bergamo) shows people clinging to religion even when tempted to be "free men". Fru Fønss (1882) is a sad story about a widow's tragic break with her egoistic children when she wants to remarry. Mogens og andre Noveller and Niels Lyhne were both highly praised by Rainer Maria Rilke in his letters to Franz Xaver Kappus, translated as Letters to a Young Poet. Poetry The poems of Jacobsen are more influenced by late romanticism than his prose. Many of them are wistful, dreamy and melancholic but also naturalistic. Most important is the great obscure poem Arabesque to a Hand-drawing by Michel Angelo (about 1875) the idea of which seems to be that art is going to replace immortality as the meaning of life. They significantly inspired the Danish symbolist poetry of the 1890s. Legacy Unlike many of his colleagues Jacobsen did not take much interest in politics, his main interests being science and psychology. He is primarily an artist: his ability to create "paintings" and arabesque-like scenes both in his prose and his poetry (which has sometimes been criticized as "mannered") is one of the secrets of his art. It has been said that his novels are a presentation of various snapshots rather than tales of action. In spite of his not very extensive oeuvre Jacobsen's international influence has been quite strong. In Germany both his novels and poems were widely read and they are known to have influenced Thomas Mann, as well as the Englishmen George Gissing and D. H. Lawrence. Gissing read the Reclam edition of Niels Lyhne in 1889 and again in 1890 when he wrote 'which I admire more than ever'. Jacobsen's works also greatly inspired Rainer Maria Rilke's prose: in Briefe an einen jungen Dichter (trans. Letters to a Young Poet) (1929) Rilke recommends to Franz Xaver Kappus to read the works of Jacobsen, adding that Rilke always carried the Bible and Jacobsen's collected works. Further, Rilke's only novel Die Aufzeichnungen des