Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/812

Rh 776 E W 1 E W I years older than himself, to ran away that they might enlist as hussars in the Prussian army. They managed to reach Hamburg just when the Seven Years War was commencing, and were allowed to enter a regiment. But the elder brother soon got tired and ran away, while the poet, after a series of extraordinary adventures, deserted to the Austrian army, where from being drummer he rose to being sergeant, and was only not made an officer because he was a Protestant. In 1760 he was weary of a soldier s life, and deserted again, getting safe back to Denmark. For the next two years he worked with great diligence at the uni versity, but the Arense for whom he had gone through so much hardship and taken so much pains married another man almost immediately after Ewald s final and very suc cessful examination. The disappointment was one from which he never recovered. He plunged into dissipation of every kind, and gave his serious thoughts only to poetry. In 1763 his first work, a perfunctory dissertation De Pyrologia Sacra, first saw the light. In 1764 he made a considerable success with a short prose story, Lyltkens Tempel (The Temple of Fortune), which was translated into German and Icelandic. On the death of Frederick V., however, Ewald first appeared prominently as a poet; he published in 1766 three Elegies over the dead king, which were received with universal acclamation, and of which one, at least, is a veritable masterpiece. But his dramatic poem Adam og Eva (Adam and Eve), by far the finest imagina tive work produced in Denmark up to that time, was re jected by the Society of Arts in 1 767, and was not published until 1769. At the latter date, however, its merits were perceived. In 1770 Ewald attained success with Pldlet, a narrative and lyrical poem, and still more with his splendid Rolf Krage, the first original Danish tragedy. For the next ten years Ewald was occupied in producing one brilliant poetical work after another, in rapid succession. In 1771 he published De Irutale Klappers (The Brutal Clappers), a tragi-comedy or parody satirizing the dispute then raging between the critics and the manager of the Royal Theatre; in 1772 he translated from the German the lyrical drama of Philemon and Baucis, and brought out his comedy of Harlequin Patriot, a satire on the passion for political scribbling created by Struensee s introduc tion of the liberty of the press. In 1773 he published Pebersvendene (Old Bachelors), a comedy. In 1771 he had already collected some of his lyrical poems under the title of Adskilliyt af Johannes Ewald (Miscellanies). In 1774 appeared the heroic opera of Balder s Dod (Balder s Death), and in 1779 the finest of his works, the lyrical drama Fislceme (The Fishers), which contains the Danish National Song, &quot; King Christian stood by the high Mast,&quot; his most famous lyric. In the two poems last mentioned, however, Ewald passed beyond contemporary taste, and these great works, the pride of Danish literature, were coldly received. But while the new poetry was slowly winning its way into popular esteem, the poet did riot lack admirers, and at the head of these he founded in 1775 the Danish Literary Society, a body which became influential, and which made the study of Ewald a cultus. But the poet s health had broken ; when he was writing Rolf Krage he was already an inmate of the Consumptive Hospital, and when he seemed to bo recovering, his health was shattered again by a night spent in the frosty streets. He embittered his ex istence by the recklessness of his private life, and finally, through a fall from a horse, he ended by becoming a com plete invalid. His last ten years were full of acute suffering ; his mother treated him with cruelty, his family with neglect, and but few even of his friends showed any manli ness or generosity towards him. In 1774 he was placed in the house of an inspector of fisheries at Rungsted, where Anna Hedevig Jacobsen, the daughter of the house, tended the wasted poet with infinite tenderness and skill. He stayed in this house for three years, and wrote there some of his finest later lyrics. Meanwhile he had fallen deeply in love with the charming solace of his sufferings, and won her consent to a marriage. This step, however, was pre vented by his family, who roughly removed him to their own keeping near Kronborg. Here he was treated so in famously that he insisted on being taken back to Copen hagen in 1777, where he found an older, but no less tender nurse, in Madame Schouw. Here he wrote Fiskerne, with his imagination full of the familiar shore at Hornbsek, near Rungsted. In 1780 he was a little better, and managed to be present at the theatre at the first performance of his poem. But this excitement destroyed him, and after months of extreme agony, he died on the 17th of March 1781, and was carried to the grave by a large assembly of his admirers, since he was now just recognized by the public for the first time as the greatest national poet. Among his papers were found fragments of three dramas, two on old Scandinavian subjects, entitled Frode and Helyo, and the third a tragedy on the story of Hamlet, which he meant to treat iu a way wholly distinct from Shakespeare s. Ewald belongs to the race of poetical reformers who ap peared in all countries of Europe at the end of last century ; but it is interesting to observe that in point of time he pre ceded all of them. He was born six years earlier than Goethe and Alfieri, sixteen years before Schiller, nine years before Andre Che&quot;nier, and twenty-seven years earlier than &quot;Wordsworth, but he did for Denmark what each of- these poets did for his own country. Ewald found Danish litera ture given over to tasteless rhetoric, and without art or vigour. He introduced vivacity of style, freshness and brevity of form, and an imaginative study of nature which was then unprecedented. But perhaps his greatest claim to notice is the fact that he was the first person to call the attention of the Scandinavian peoples to the treasuries of their ancient history and mythology, and to suggest the use of these in imaginative writing. &quot;With a colouring more dis tinctly modern than that of Collins and Gray, his lyrics yet resemble the odes of these his English contemporaries more closely than those of any Continental poet; from another point of view his ballads remind us of those of Schiller, which they preceded. His dramas, which had an immense influence on the Danish stage, are now chiefly of antiquarian interest, with the exception of &quot; The Fishers,&quot; a work that must always live as a great national poem. In personal character and in fate Ewald seems to have been not unlike Heinrich Heine. The first collected edition of Ewald s works began to appear in his life-time. It is in four volumes, 1780-1784. They have con stantly been reprinted, but the standard edition is that by Lieben- berg, in 8 vols., 1850-1855. (E. W. G.) EWING, ALEXANDER (1814-1873), a clergyman of the Scotch Episcopal Church, bishop of Argyll and the Isles, was descended from an old Highland family, and was born in Aberdeen 25th March 1814. After spending two sessions at the university of that city, where he manifested a special bent towards the study of natural history, he studied for a time at a private school in Chelsea, and in 1831 he attended the classes of chemistry, natural philosophy, and natural history in the university of Edinburgh. His uncertain health, howevvy, compelled him for a time to suspend all systematic study. The property inherited from his father rendered it unnecessary for him to adopt a profession from pecuniary considera tions, and his delicate health counselled at least delay in taking such a step. Accordingly, for some time after his marriage be occupied himself chiefly in the cultiva tion of his literary and artistic tastes, residing at first in the north of Scotland, and in October 1838 journeying to Italy,