Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/377

Rh To the last he appended an exposition of the rules of Swedish metre, adopting Voss as his model.

Johan David Valerius (1776-1852) belonged in his youth to the academical school, and wrote various things in its style. His numerous songs rank much higher, and among them are found several drinking songs, written according to the taste of that age. In form they are above criticism and they frequently run in a very jovial vein, sometimes betraying excessive rudeness and levity. The Finlander Michael Choräus (1774-1806) interests us chiefly as Franzéns and Runeberg's forerunner, inasmuch as he in a certain way indicated the direction which the productions of those poets would have to take. Among his works, which are as a whole very sentimental, there are a few very fine elegies.

These are the most remarkable representatives of the academical group in the Gustavian period. Its other members are not worthy of mention. But the other group, that is the national one, is on the whole far more interesting, for in it we find the really great poets, who distinguished themselves not only by skilful treatment of the forms, but also by excellence and wealth of thought, and thus are of real value to the literature of their country.

In this circle of poets, whose chief theme was popular life, Karl Michael Bellman is by all odds the greatest. This most original of all Swedish poets, a character almost without a parallel in all Europe, was born in Stockholm February 4, 1740. His father was an official and gave the gifted boy a good education. To his father's house came many men of genius and culture, and among them Dalin who was the hero of the day. His parents were very religious, maintaining daily devotions and singing devotional hymns. The