Page:Von Heidenstam - Sweden's laureate, selected poems of Verner von Heidenstam (1919).djvu/32

 direct, has assumed a ring of command. His words awaken now not merely admiration, but enthusiasm. Without his saying so, we feel in him the quality of St. Paul affirming: "I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith." In him is the just self-confidence of the man who is "the captain of his soul." He has found a deeper joy than pleasure. "," he says.

It is the man behind the poem that has won a nation for his audience. When he adjures his fellow-countrymen to emulate the deeds of their ancestors in the modern fields "of science and art and letters," he is heeded because he has himself shown the way. There are no finer modern poems of patriotism than the series entitled "," where Heidenstam prays for years of misfortune to "smite us and lash us into one." It is the fighting optimist who inveighs against weighing men in a money-scale and dividing the head of the nation from the heart, and it is he again who in "" bids the new-born day

There are still gloomy pieces in this last volume. These are, however, relieved by poems of reconcilia-