Page:Von Heidenstam - Sweden's laureate, selected poems of Verner von Heidenstam (1919).djvu/24

 poetic sketches which fairly glowed with the warmth and color of Paris, Italy, and the East. In 1887 he was summoned home to the death-bed of his father and in 1888 his poems were published under the title. Pilgrimages and Wanderyears.

Heidenstam's first book, despite the fact that it was considered "exotic" and "peculiar," had a brilliant success; it was in fact pronounced one of the most remarkable debuts in Swedish literature. Of the poetry in itself we shall speak later. Suffice it here to say that Heidenstam, no longer in doubt as to his true vocation, settled down once more in his native region to fulfill his artistic destiny. From then on his life has been the succession of prose and poetry volumes that came from his pen.

Heidenstam's next important book, the novel Hans Alienus, was another succession of travel-pictures through which the hero passes in search of his ideal. This he partly finds on his return to Sweden in the worship of a simple and austere beauty. His life, however, appears to him to be a negation, a sacrifice of being to the desire of merely knowing.

In his Poems, published in 1895, Heidenstam comes much nearer to finding himself. These are alternately narrative, descriptive, and reflective, and are nearly all about Sweden. There is a concentration, a firmness, a strength in them as of Antaeus in contact with his mother earth. The same spirit pervades his collections of tales from Swedish history and legend, works which by their vivid and forceful