udiences during the summer and fall of 1838, and were so
enthusiastically received that the students, on the evening of the
concluding lecture, arranged a splendid banquet for the speaker, at which
one of them sang:

Yes, through years of lonely struggle
Did you bravely fight,
Bearing scorn without complaining
Till your hair turned white.

During his most lonely years Grundtvig once comforted himself with the
words of a Greek sage: "Speak to the people of yesterday, and you will be
heard by the people of tomorrow." Thus it was, no doubt, a great
satisfaction to him that the first public honor bestowed upon him should
be accorded him by his nation's youth.

From that day his reputation and influence grew steadily. He became an
honored member of several influential societies, such as the Society for
Northern Studies, and the Scandinavian Society, an association of
academicians from all the Scandinavian countries for the purpose of
effecting a closer spiritual and cultural union between them. He also
received frequent invitations to lecture both on outstanding occasions
and before special groups. His work as a lecturer probably reached its
culmination at a public meeting on the Skamlingsbanke, a wooded hill on
the borders of Slesvig, where he spoke to thousands of profoundly stirred
listeners, and at a great meeting of Scandinavian students at Oslo,
Norway, in 1851, to which he was invited as the guest of honor and
acclaimed both by the students and the Norwegian people. When Denmark
became a constitutional kingdom in 1848, he was a member of the
constitutional assembly and was elected several times to the Riksdag.

Meanwhile he worked ceaselessly for the development of his folk and
educational ideals. After his conversion, he felt for a time that his new
outlook was incompatible with his previous enthusiasm for the heroic life
and ideals of the old North, and that he must now devote himself solely
to the preaching of the Gospel. But the formerly mentioned decline of all
phases of Danish life during the early part of the nineteenth century and
the failure of his preaching to evoke any response from an indifferent
people caused him to suspect a closer relationship between a people's
religious and national or folk-life than he had hitherto recognized. Was
not the folk life of a people, after all, the soil in which the Word of
God must be sown, and could the Word bear fruit in a soil completely
harden