Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/258

240 lenschläger unlocked its treasures for his people. "In Ewald's 'Rolf Krage, the northern Saga for the first time opened her grave-mound and disclosed to me the shades of the departed," Oehlenschläger has said. And in his own works these spirits of the past were for the first time conjured up in such a manner that the whole people could see and recognize them. Of how great importance this was to the poetic literature of Denmark and for the whole intellectual life of the North will be seen from a very superficial comparison between the form which romanticism assumed in the North, and that which it had in Germany, a country which for centuries had been in a most intimate intellectual union with Denmark, and from which the romantic school had been introduced in Denmark. For while the German romantic school completely loses itself in the incense-smoke of the middle ages and in idle, fantastical musings, or abandons itself to a reactionary obscurantism, Oehlenschläger on the contrary turns himself with his robust, vigorous and thoroughly northern nature to the equally strong, bracing antiquity. And thus his poetry gets a firm basis and support, which preserves it from the aberrations of romanticism, and enables it to lay the foundation of a rich poetic development. For this reason Oehlenschläger is not only what we generally understand by a great poet, but he is also in a great measure the founder of the entire national life of Denmark in this century.

Many objections have been raised in recent years to the manner in which Oehlenschläger conceived and represented the ancient life in the North, nor can it be denied that his pictures are, in many respects, very unreal. But at the same time it must not be forgotten that the ever increasing interest in the past, through which northern archaeology was called into life, or, in other words, that very science which has been the cause of a more thorough criticism of Oehlenschläger's works, is itself the result of that movement to the advancement of which he, through his poetry, was the main