n
of the bishopric of Wexioe. Unhappily Professor Boettiger's edition is
very chary of dates, and as Dr. Brandes has truly observed, is arranged
with the obvious purpose of falsifying the sequence of Tegner's poems
and confusing the reader. The three periods--previous to 1812, 1812-40,
and 1840-46--are entirely arbitrary, and plainly devised with a view to
concealing, in so far as they are capable of concealment, the unhappy
events which undermined the strength of the Titan and wrecked his
splendid powers. But such a purpose is utterly futile, as long as the
poems themselves had once escaped into publicity.

It was during the period while his sky was yet unclouded that Tegner
enriched Swedish literature with a series of lyrics which in point of
lucidity of thought and brilliancy of diction have rarely been
surpassed. It may be admitted, without materially detracting from his
merit, that in some of them the foreign models from which they were in a
measure fashioned shimmer through. Just as the Germans, Gottsched and
Bodmer, held foreign models to be indispensable, and only disagreed as
to which were the best, so the Swedish Academy, which in its
predilections was French, had no scruple in recommending this or that
literary form for imitation. That degree of literary independence which
Germany reached with Goethe and Schiller, who discarded all models, the
Scandinavian countries did not reach until a much later period; and
Tegner was one of those who stimulated that national self-respect
without which independence is impossible.

A strong spiritual kinship drew him to Schiller, whose splendor of
imagery and impassioned rhetoric were the very gifts which he himself in
a superlative degree possessed. The breath of political and religious
liberalism which pervades the writings of the German poet was also
highly congenial to Tegner, and last, but not least, they were both
light-loving, beauty-worshipping Hellenists, and, though externally
conformists, hid joyous pagan souls under imperfect Christian draperies.
Small blame it is therefore to Tegner that Schiller's poems furnished
him with frequent suggestions and sometimes also with metres. Schiller
had, in "The Gods of Greece," sung a glorious elegy on the Olympian age
which stimulated his Swedish rival to write "The Asa Age," in which he
regretted, though in a rather half-hearted way, the disappearance of
Odin, Thor, and Freya. The poem, it must be admitted, falls much belo