, 1875-02-27

enthusiasm that was the highest excitement his
unaided nature could attain, when Heinrich
Steffens suddenly appeared in Copenhagen,
preaching q new creed. and gathering disciples
around him. Steffens had been one Of the first
men in Germany to preach the new doctrines of
the Romanticists,- SHAT poetry was not q fit
subject for fashionable eclecticism, that its scope
was as wide as humanity, and that it found
it's fttest shrine in what was exalted, antique,
and mysterious. Tieck had pointed back
to Shakespeare, Schlegel had gone further still,
and demanded o return to the simplicity and
passion of the Greek drama. These were DAYS
when Fichte was making himself heard, and
Humboldt, and when Goethe was already as.
Stunning dictatorial honours. The eloquent and
~vivacious Stefens, with the magnetic charm of
his personal appearance and the FIRE of his deli
very, made an enormous stir 10 Copenhagen.
Whoever could bear the new doctrine gathered
to his lecture.room those who could not, re.
viled ; and the literary world of Copenhagen,
then a very wide one for the size of the city,
was suddenly divided into two fierce factions.
On Ghlenschleger, however, the effect of
SteffeDs's teaching was more than magical the
presence of this man troubled him and moved
him. He ceased work he became restless q
volume of poems, paid for by an admiring pub
Usher, lay nearly finished in his hands, but he
could not work on it. Suddenly one morning
he called on the new teacher from Germany.
1t was the critical moment of his life, and of
the future of Danish poetry. The two mon
began to talk at eleven in the forenoon they
did not break off till three the next morning.
GhlenSchleger slept in Steffens's house, tossing
and dreaming, and then after breakfast rushed
home, and locked himself in. He then destroy
ed his volume of poems, returned the honorari-
49, A. ALD Ia ~A =
beautiful lyrical romance, GuIdhornene. He
finished this long poem before night, and rushed
OF with it to StefeDs. "Ah : now you arc at
last a poet r. said the master, delighted to find
in this susceptible youth a mind of unimagined
wealth that needed nothing more than skilful
excavation to surprise the world. Henceforth.
till in a year or two be left Denmark, Steffens,
who thoroughly understood the weak and i'm
~pressible nature of Ghlenschlmger, never ceased
to mould and stimulate his pupil, and watched
with extraordinary delight the brilliant progress
of bis poetry. When Stefens, with his neolo-
gian ideas, had made Copenhagen too hot to
hold him, Ghlenschl@ger followed him with
lamb-like devotion to his PROFESSIONAL room in
the University of Halle. Here he was in con-
slant communication with two men, Steffens and
Schleiermacher, and here it was that he wrote,
in the autumn of 1905, the first and greatest of
bis tragedies, the Hak0m JarL, of which Mr..
Lascelles has given US a very faithful ~transla-
ton. And it is from this point that the modern
poetical literature of Scandinavia NAV be said
to set out, for though the poet in the two pre-
vious years had written much that was most
original and beautiful, the lyrical drama of
Aladdin, for instance, and the best as well as
first part of NOrdens GWder, it was not till he
enriched the literature with the first of his
tragedies that he really proved himself to be
q poet OF the first class, and the creator of a
new order Of writing.
After seventy years, now, when Ticks
romances, Schiller's early plays, Novalis's
lyrics, and the sentimentalities of" Lucinde"
have alike become unreliable, an innate
vitality preserves the best of the works of
Ohlenschl@ger. Even in its English garb,
which does not render in all points the force
Of the original, the reader will hardly fail
to be excited and moved in studying Hakou
Jart. The progress of realism in art makes
it difficult for US to do Justice to the enormous
reaction that was implied when an audience
could accept such scenes as these in the place
of translations from Zase and Alziye, but
by an effort of the imagination one can force
oneself to realise the impression that would
be made on such an audience by the thrilling
scene in which the traitor, Thorsr Klake.
instrueting his fool. the thrall Crib, how to
murder King Olaf, gives him a poisoned knife,
and in which the screech of q raven lstirs an
odd kind of renaorse in the FOOLS brain, and
ne stabs Thorer himself; or the still more
mastery passage, where the hunted and de-