s, the more its value,
The more the daylight shines and glitters through it.
The ancients builded unto Truth a temple,
A fair rotunda, light as heaven's vault.
And freely poured the sunshine from all sides
Into its open round; the winds of heaven
Amid its ranks of pillars gayly gambolled.
But now instead we build a Tower of Babel,
A heavy, barbarous structure. Darkness peeps
From out its deep and narrow grated casements.
Unto the sky the tower was meant to reach,
But hitherto we've only had confusion.
As in the realm of thought, in that of song
It is; and poesy is e'er transparent ..."

[36] A magister promotion corresponds approximately to our
university commencements. It is the ceremony of bestowing the degree
of master of arts.

This was certainly an attractive doctrine, and it did not fail to
command public approval. But it suffers from exactly the same limitation
as Tegner's gospel of joy. It is only relatively (I might almost say
temperamentally) true; and the opposite might be maintained with equal
force, and in fact was so maintained by Atterbom, who declared (in the
"Poetical Calendar for 1821") that there can be no such a conception as
light without darkness. Darkness, he says, is the condition of all color
and form. You distinguish the light and all things in it only by the
contrasting effect of shadow--all of which, I fancy, Tegner would not
have denied. More to the point would have been the query whether in
poetry darkness and indistinctness are synonymous terms. It is only the
most commonplace truths which can be made intelligible to all. Much of
the best and highest thinking of humanity lies above the plane of the
ordinary untrained intellect. What is light to me may be twilight or
darkness to you. What to you is clear as the daylight, may to me be as
densely impenetrable as the Cimmerian night. Christ himself recognized
this fact when he said to his disciples: "I have yet many things to say
unto you, but ye cannot bear them now."

For all that, Tegner's doctrine was in its effect wholesome. It
discouraged the writers of the Romantic School, who under the guise of
profundity gave publicity to much immature and confused thinking. He was
no doubt right in saying that "a poetry which commences with
whooping-cough is likely to end in consumption." His frequently repeated
maxim, that poetry is nothing but the health of life, "occasioned by a