Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/422

404 poured in upon him, and became indelibly stamped upon his soul, to be afterwards reproduced in his poetical compositions. In one of his best prose works he has given a masterly description of the grand, wild nature and of the quaint popular life of this region, where the people even at the present day preserve the same simple ways they did centuries ago. In 1830 he was appointed docent in Latin literature at the Helsingfors University, and in this same year he published his first collection of poems, chiefly lyrics. It contains among other things a poem of some length, "Svartsjukans nätter" (Nights of Jealousy), which, like several of his earlier poems, suffers from a certain pretentious pathos and a sort of didactic style borrowed from Tegnér. His simple and charming scenes from real life are far superior to the former, especially those fine and graceful songs, entitled "Idyll och Epigram," which in tone and spirit are closely related to the Finnish and Serbian popular ballads, but without being an imitation of them. He thereupon published a collection of Serbian popular songs in a Swedish translation, and also the epic-lyric poem, "Grafven i Perrho," which latter won the prize offered by the Swedish Academy. This poem represents a Finnish peasant family which has been surprised by the Kossack enemy, and is tortured to death. The father curses his son in the belief that he has absented himself from cowardice, but still lives to see the latter avenge both his father and his brothers. In this no less effective than simple sketch, Runeberg is for the first time wholly and completely a Finnish poet, filled with an ardent patriotism, and with a profound appreciation of the exceptive position of his people who have been steeled in a desperate struggle for existence. From this time his master works follow in rapid succession. Among the first were the idylls, "Elgskyttarne" (the Elk-hunters), "Hanna," and "Julqvällen" (Christmas evening), all three in the broadest epic form in hexameters, reminding us of Goethe's "Hermann und Dorothea," and in no way inferior to that poem. The action in these idylls is very simple, but