Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/168

150 the Catholic time. A still greater number were translated from German, but in all of them the poetical element is utterly smothered by moral and dogmatic rules and statements. Little or no attention was given to the form. A spirit of exaltation was fashionable among the evangelical people of that time, and whoever happened to be in an exalted state of mind sang as best he could. Whether his hymns pleased the congregation, and whether they were to be preserved and printed, depended on altogether different circumstances than those of a more or less artistic form. It is, indeed, difficult to understand how the greater part of all these hymns were preserved from age to age, for neither in their external form nor in their contents can they be said to differ much from ordinary prose.

Of greater interest are the political poems, particularly the biting on the papacy and on Catholicism and its institutions in general. One of the best ones is Hans Tausen's allegorical song on truth and falsehood. It represents how the former is everywhere banished by the latter, and by the monks who are determined to starve truth to death, how it is kept imprisoned until freedom is, after all, at last promised to it. This poem is vastly superior to Tausen's other poetical performances, and when we consider the pithy, pregnant language in which it is written and the fidelity with which the main thought is sustained to the end, it will be found to be without a peer in Denmark's satirical literature of this period. It has evidently been composed in a moment when the religious and ethical enthusiasm turned the warrior into a true poet,—perhaps during some lull following the great storms in which the cause he fought for had suffered the most imminent peril, probably about the year 1533, when by "special grace" he had been sentenced by the bishops to resign forever his office of preacher, and when he had revenged himself by undertaking the defence of one of those