old by a sergeant
of his recollections of the war, they deal with real personages, most
of them drawn from the humblest stations in life, described just as
they really lived and spoke and acted. Yet throughout the story of
their simple acts and thoughts there swept a breeze which kindled
the blood, roused the emotions; and fired the patriotic feeling of
Runeberg's contemporaries. In poetic depth and beauty of language,
as in style and conception, and in their departure from all the
prevailing ideas and methods of romanticism, these lyric tales were
a revelation. They classed their author at once as in the line of
true-born poets. The works of Runeberg, although properly belonging
to the literature of a country politically no longer one with Sweden,
have from the nature of their subjects and the identity of languages,
always been looked upon in Sweden as common property, and they have
certainly exercised a powerful influence on Swedish thought and
letters. Some of his songs, set to music, are to this day sung as
national anthems.

The last champion of dying romanticism was a sort of universal genius,
eccentric, _bizarre_, unequal, a spirit out of harmony with itself,
but gifted with the most wonderful imagination and power, K.J.L.
Almquist. His life was as checquered as his writings were various. In
turn a clergyman, a schoolmaster, a journalist, and an exile, he has
written volumes on almost every conceivable subject, from fiction,
poetry, and history, to lexicography, pedagogy, and mathematics. His
stories, published in two series, under the common title of _The
Book of the Hedgerose_, show powers of conception, imagination, and
description such as are only to be found in Edgar Allen Poe. His was
an essentially revolutionary temperament. He disdained all authority,
and cavilled at all moral restraints. He was in constant rebellion
against society, its accepted laws and precepts, and vented his moral
skepticism in bitter sarcasm and cutting paradoxes. "But two things
are white in this world," he would say, "innocence and arsenic." The
coupling of the two, however, nearly proved fatal to him. He was
involved in a mysterious affair of poisoning, in which the victim was
a dunning creditor. He was suspected of having given him arsenic by
way of ridding himself of the debt which he could not pay. No proof
of the fact could be adduced, and the crime was never brought home to
him; but public opinion was against him, and feari