Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/259

Rh contributor. When his works appeared there was as yet no enthusiasm for northern antiquities; but the enthusiasm was created by his works.

Like Baggesen, Oehlenschläger also had the strange illusion that he could be a German, as well as a Danish, poet. When he began his literary career he deeply felt how much he owed to the great poets of Germany, and he also realized that the Germans were a people closely related to the Danes. He therefore made an attempt to belong to both, but his efforts were unsuccessful, and when he approached the end of his life he saw that he had not, as he had intended, directed the eyes of his countrymen to the south, but that he turned them to the north, and that he had awakened in the northern nations a vivid realization of their racial affinity, a fact obscured by centuries of discord. In the summer of 1829 Tegner crowned "the northern king of song" in the Lund cathedral. This was a recognition of the auspicious fact "that the time of discord was at an end," and to this none had contributed more than Oehlenschläger. On the 20th of January, 1850, this "Adam of the skalds" closed the life that had been so important, not only for Denmark, but also for the entire North.

Almost simultaneous with the publication of Oehlenschläger's first epoch-making collection of poems, there also appeared the first poems of (1769-1826). He was of German extraction, but acquired such a command of the Danish language that he was able to use it with the same facility as his mother tongue. His works evince extraordinary poetic talent, though they suffer from a too great tendency to speculation and frequently move in a sphere of pure abstractions. He wrote exclusively lyrical