Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/48

Rh A Danish author of the present day — Johan Ludwig Heiberg, son of the banished dramatist — has said that the first French revolution was "a thunderstorm which cleared away the thick mists which for centuries had accumulated on the horizon of human life—a frightful tempest while it raged, but useful in its effects — a flash of lightning, that had sundered many gdling chains — an overthrow that was necessary—an instrument in the hands of Providence." But though the French nation might have required that violent process of clearing, sundering, and overthrowing, it was in no way needed among the quiet Danes, who, though capable of being roused by strong excitement, are yet constitutionally calm, and were, as they are still, well inclined towards their king and his government.

There is a great deal of nationality and patriotism among the Danes, as may be seen by all their popular poetry, from the days of Johannes Ewald to those of Hans Christian Andersen. "Scarcely any writer," says a Danish critic, "was ever more largely endowed with poetical talents than Ewald. The power of his imagination, and warmth of his feelings, did not evince themselves first in his writings, but in his life; and they impelled him, both as a boy and as a young man, into strange wild adventures, while seeking the realisation of his visionary schemes, and to gain the object on which he lavished the love that was gushing, as it were, from some hidden fountain in his heart. But when, at length, wearied of his vain battling with adverse circumstances, he had given up in despair the struggle to obtain that amount of earthly good fortune and virtuous happiness which could alone have satisfied his ardent soul, to escape from the pangs of disappointment and blasted hope, he imprudently plunged into a course of dissipation. It was only for a moment, however, now and then, that such pleasures could divert his thoughts from their habitual melancholy; nor could they change the bias of his mind; for his better nature turned to the cultivation of poetry, and in this more legitimate resource he found eventually some consolation amidst broken health and ruined prospects."

Ewald was born in 1743, in Copenhagen, where his father was a clergyman. At eleven years of ago he had the misfortune to lose that parent, and was sent to a school in Schleswig, where he remained for four years. Here he read with eager interest "Robinson Crusoe," that work which has really tended to unsettle so many boyish minds, and to inspire that desire for roving and adventures, which has led numbers of youths to select the army or the navy as their profession, or to become emigrants to distant countries; the perusal of this, to schoolboys, so attractive work of De Foe, fired the young Ewald’s romantic imagination, and was the primary cause of the follies which he committed. He had been about a year entered as a student at the university of Copenhagen, when he formed a passionate attachment to a young lady, and with the Quixotic idea of winning such fame and fortune by the career of arms as might entitle him to become her suitor, he absconded from his home and his studies, to seek military employment among the troops of Frederick II,, who was then engaged in the Seven Years' War. Though the new recruit was very young, and also very small of his age, his services were accepted, and he was placed in the ranks of a regiment of infantry. But he was not satisfied with his situation in the Prussian