Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/334

316 to, first from Germany and afterward from France, and which naturally affected the language, Swedish entered upon an essentially independent career. About the middle of the seventeenth century it had thoroughly assumed the character which separates it from the Danish, and had acquired that harder and more sonorous ring, which it owes to the fact that phonetically and in inflection it adhered more closely to the original tongue. But the continued intercourse with foreign countries caused the Swedish to be weighed down with an ever increasing mass of foreign words, until a decided change for the better took place about the middle of the eighteenth century when by the aid of a number of clever writers it was regenerated into a genuine northern tongue. Since that time it has continued to develop its own peculiar characteristics and has become celebrated no less for its power than for its simplicity.