Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/260

242 poems and romances, and many of them give evidence of deep emotion and genuine poetic sentiment, and are marked by great beauty of form. The spiritual kinship existing between his and Oehlenschläger's first poems is also a characteristic fact. Staffeldt was unquestionably influenced by his great contemporary, but the similarity between the two surely has a deeper reason, which must be sought in the romanticism and in the natural philosophy, which at that time were so much developed and by which both poets had been influenced, though in different degrees. Oehlenschläger soon found, as we know, his work in the field of northern antiquities, and in it his poetry developed in a perfectly characteristic and independent manner, and thus he was able to found his own northern kingdom in the realm of romanticism, while Staffeldt continued in the path he once had entered upon, and his poetry is accordingly more German than northern in its character.

In we have a nature widely different from Oehlenschläger, and yet he exercised in many respects an equally important influence on the intellectual life of Denmark. He was born September 8, 1783, and was descended from a family who had given the country a whole line of excellent preachers. At the university he was a fellow student of Oehlenschläger, and devoted himself to the study of theology. The battle of Copenhagen made a deep impression on him, too, and he was also greatly influenced by the lectures of his cousin Steffens, but inasmuch as Grundtvig clung tenaciously to the views of the olden time, he did not accept all of Steffens' tenets. From Steffens' lectures fell seeds, however, into his soul, which later germinated and were destined to bear abundant fruit. "Steffens," says Grundtvig of himself, "was the first man to make me aware of the fact that history really means something. I did