Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/198

180 unsurpassed, notwithstanding the fact that Denmark has had many fine psalmists. There is no doubt that Kingo's example has had great influence on the development of the psalm literature in Denmark. Kingo has also written a number of secular poems, varying in style and contents. These were also highly esteemed by his contemporaries, and they procured him many influential patrons, but on the whole they are destitute of value, for they differ in no wise from the other soulless and tasteless metric productions, with which that age was flooded. Only when his poetry is permeated by his strong and intense faith, does it have power fully to spread its wings. For his fame as one of Denmark's greatest poets Kingo is indebted to his hymns alone. He gave a full and vigorous expression to all that which in the earlier Danish psalms had proved only a feeble, stammering utterance. What had before existed merely in the bud, expanded in Kingo into a beautiful and fragrant flower. A feature, which in a high degree contributes to the sonorousness of Kingo's hymns, is his perfect mastery of the spirit of the language, a rare accomplishment in his time. Of this he was perfectly conscious, and he expressed it with elegance in connection with his love for his native language. Complaints in regard to the neglect of the vernacular were not unfrequent in the latter half of the learned period, but no one has shown more effectually than Kingo demonstrated, that this neglect was undeserved, or what grand results might be achieved with that despised native tqngue, when it chanced to fall into the right hands.

(1635-1716), the wife of a Norwegian clergyman, composed many religious and devotional songs, which gained the favor of her contemporaries to such an extent that the name of the "eleventh muse" was bestowed on her. (Sappho was, according to the ideas of that age, regarded as the tenth.) She was also popular as a