his life he spent mostly lying upon a sofa in his
library, surrounded by great piles of books containing a most
miscellaneous assortment of classics, from Homer to Goethe,
intersprinkled with controversial pamphlets and recent novels. He was
gentle and affectionate in his demeanor; and his beautiful face lighted
up with a smile whenever any of his children or grandchildren approached
him. Once or twice a day he drove out in his carriage, and he was even
able to visit his eldest son, who was a clergyman in Scania, and to
receive the sacrament for the last time from his hand. Shortly after his
return he was stricken with paralysis, and died November 2, 1846, in the
sixty-fourth year of his age. His mind was unclouded and his voice was
clear. When the autumnal sun suddenly burst through the windows and
shone upon the dying poet, he murmured: "I will lift up mine hands unto
the house and the mountain of God."

These were his last words. He was carried to the grave at night by the
light of lanterns, followed by a long procession of the clergy,
citizens, and the school-boys of his diocese. Peasants, from whose ranks
he had sprung and to whom he was always a good friend, bore his coffin.

The academic tendency which "idealizes" life and shuns earth-scented
facts, had, through the decisive influence of Tegner, been victorious in
Swedish literature. I am aware that some will regard this as a
questionable statement; for the academicism of Tegner is not the
stately, bloodless, Gallic classicism of the Gustavian age, of which
Leopold was the last representative. It is much closer to the classicism
of Goethe in "Iphigenia" and "Hermann and Dorothea," and of Schiller in
"Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm Tell." Tegner's poetic creed was exactly that
of Schiller, who saw no impropriety in making the peasant lad, Arnold
Melchthal, when he hears that his father has been blinded, deliver an
enraptured apostrophe to the light:

"O eine edle Himmelsgabe ist
Das Licht des Auges," etc.

The rhetorical note is predominant in both. Their thoughts have to be
arrayed in the flowing toga before they are held to be presentable. This
is the academic tendency in Sweden as in France, even though the degree
of euphemistic magniloquence may differ with the age and latitude. The
Swedes have been called the Frenchmen of the North, and there is no
doubt that delight in this toga-clad rhetoric is inherent in both. It
was because Tegner, in appealing to