t him; and he exerted himself to the utmost to
fill the less congenial office as conscientiously as he did his academic
chair. The peasants of Staefvie and Lackalaenge were always welcome at his
hospitable board; he gave them freely his advice, and in order to recall
and emphasize his own kinship with them, he invited a peasant woman to
become the godmother of his youngest son, and selected all the sponsors
from the same class.

This was not the only occasion on which Tegner demonstrated his
superiority to all snobbish pretensions. He was not only not ashamed of
his peasant descent, but he was proud of it. Once (1811) during a visit
to Raemen, he took it into his head that he desired to know, from actual
experience, the kind of lives which his ancestors must have lived; and
to that end he dressed himself in wadmal, loaded a dray with pig-iron,
greased its axles, harnessed his team, and drove it to the nearest city,
a distance of ten to twelve miles. He induced three of his
brothers-in-law, two of whom were army officers and one a government
clerk, to follow his example. Up hill and down hill they trudged, and
arrived late in the afternoon, footsore and with blistered hands, in the
town, where they reported at the office of a commission merchant, sold
their iron and obtained their receipts. That of Tegner was made out to
Esaias Esaiasson, which would have been his name, if his father had
never risen from the soil. The four sham peasants now bought seed-corn
with the money they had obtained for their iron, loaded again their
wagons, and started for home. But they had forgotten to take into
account the robustness of the rustic appetite, and before they had
proceeded far their bag of provisions was empty. To add to their
discomfort the rain began to pour down, but they would not seek
shelter. After midnight they arrived at Raemen, hungry and drenched, not
having slept for two nights, but happy and proud of their feat of
endurance.

It was in 1811 that Tegner's poem "Svea" received the prize of the
Swedish Academy; and the fact that it recalled (in single passages at
least) Oehlenschlaeger's "The Golden Horns," does not seem to have
weighed in the verdict. It is not in any sense an imitation; but there
is an audible reminiscence which is unmistakable in the metre and
cadence of the short-lined verses, descriptive of the vision. Never, I
fancy, had the Swedish language been made to soar with so strong a
wing-beat, never bef