845 



TEGNKR, ESAIAS. 



TEGNR, ESAIAS. 



to matriculate that it was said it would Lave sufficed for a degree. 

 His want of means became however at this time so pressing, though 

 he was supported by contributions from Branting and Myrhrnan, that 

 he resolved to relinquish a learned career ; but a life of Anacreon 

 which he wrote in classical Latin, led Professor Norberg to advise him 

 and, apparently, to assist him to continue the struggle. For some 

 time he studied eighteen or twenty hours a day ; he mado proficiency 

 in mathematics, as well as in other studies, but unfortunately at tho 

 same time that he became remarkable for learning, he became remark- 

 able for the awkwardness, reserve, and rusticity of his manners. A 

 post as under librarian, and afterwards that of assistant-teacher of 

 aesthetics, increased his income, and finally, in 1806, he was enabled to 

 marry, and Anna Myrhman became his partner for life. Then a 

 change took place, which was extraordinary, strange, and sudden. 

 Immediately after his marriage ha became all at once as fond of com- 

 pany as he had been averse to it, lively, open, and full of spirits to an 

 extreme, which seems on many occasions to have led him to objection- 

 able levity. The wit of the Greek professor at Lund was often 

 censured as passing the bounds of decorum. This professorship was 

 conferred on him almost as a right when, in 1812, a separate professor- 

 ship of Greek was first established at Lund. Together with the pro- 

 fessorship he received the living of Stafje, which obliged him to take 

 holy orders, and for the next twelve years of his life he passed his 

 time happily in the duties of his professorship, and in the culitvation 

 of poetry, which he had commenced some time before, but which he 

 prosecuted during this time with such success that he was finally 

 hailed by common consent the first poet of Sweden living or dead. 



His first public appearance iu verse which attracted any attention, 

 was on a melancholy occasion the loss of his brother Lars Gustaf, 

 who died in 1802. His elegy on that event was inserted in the 

 ' Transactions ' of the literary society of Gottenburg, from whom it 

 received some sort of prize. It was in 1808 however when there was 

 an alarm of invasion that he suddenly burst forth as a poet of the 

 first order, by his 'War-Song of the Scanian Land-Defenders,' or 

 ' Local Militia.' " This warlike dithyrambic," says Bottiger, " sounded 

 like a tocsin in every patriotic ear. Tones at once so grand and 

 beautiful had never before been heard from the Swedish lyre. The" 

 electric lines ran like wildfire through the kingdom, bearing testimony 

 that the North now owned a Tyrtaeus fully equal to him who sang in 

 Sparta." In 1811 another patriotic poem entitled ' Svea,' won the 

 prize of the Swedish Academy ; it was a spirited outburst of indignation 

 at the degeneracy of the modern Swedes, compared with their ances- 

 tors, whose swords weighed so heavily in the balance of Europe. 

 Tegne'r, who visited Stockholm to receive the prize, became acquainted 

 with many of its literary men, at a time of transition when the 

 Phosphorists, headed by Palmblad [PALMBLAT>], the introducers of 

 German literature into their country, were contending against the 

 old French school of classicality and elegance, whose chief literary 

 representative was Leopold. Tegner, who was thought by his youth 

 and his genius, naturally to belong to the anti-classical party, excited 

 some surprise by his undertaking the defence of Leopold, which he 

 afterwards followed up by dedicating to him his poem of ' Axel.' 

 His consecration as a priest in 1812 gave occasion to a poem on that 

 subject, which was afterwards surpassed by a poem of the same kind, 

 his ' Nattvardsbarnen ;' or children of the Lord's Supper, a sort of 

 religious idyl, in 1820. In the same year,- 1820, some cantos of his 

 'Frithiofs Saga,' a romantic tale of ancient Scandinavia, appeared in 

 the ' Iduna,' a periodical published by the Gothic Society, of which 

 Geijer [GEIJEE] was the leading member, with whom Tegne'r had 

 become personally acquainted in the country before either of them 

 emerged into fame. His reputation was enhanced in 1821 by the 

 publication of ' Axel,' a brief poetic romance, still thought by many 

 the finest of his poems. It attained its culminating point in 1825, by 

 the completion of ' Frithiofs Saga,' which became at once the most 

 popular poem that has ever appeared iu Sweden. From the period 

 of the publication of ' Axel,' if not before, the name of Tegner was 

 recognised as that of the undisputed head of Swedish poetry. 



This period of TegneYs life was brought to a close by an unexpected, 

 and at least at the outset, an unwelcome event. In ] 824 he received 

 the intelligence that the clergy of the diocese of Wexio had presented 

 his name to the king as one of the three whom they nominated for 

 the vacant bishopric, and that the king had been pleased to select him 

 for that office. As a clergyman he had not been remarkable for 

 gravity of demeanour, and the general impression was that an excellent 

 Greek professor and an unequalled poet would now be turned into a 

 very indifferent bishop. These expectations were disappointed. From 

 the time of his appointment TegneYs life took a different course. He 

 ceased to appear as a poet, and gave himself up to the business of his 

 diocese, and in particular to tho management of its revenues, in which 

 his early experience with Branting was said to be found of use. Almost 

 the only unepiscopal episode we hear of for some years is on that 

 memorable day in 1829 when he presented the poetical crown to 

 Oehlenschliiger [OEHLENSCHLAGEB]. He gave himself up to theolo- 

 gical studies, and was found in his study " walled up with fathers of 

 the church and biblical commentators." Thirty-one new churches were 

 built in his diocese during his episcopate. At the diets which he 

 attended he was distinguished for his conservative principles and his 

 opposition to what he called " Radicalism," at the time when his old 



BIOG. DIV. VOL. V. 



friend Geijer who had at one time been tending the came way, 

 suddenly broke with the conservative party, on account of its pro- 

 pensity to carry reaction too far. His old liveliness was still to be 

 found in his private letters. In the Diet of 1834 financial affairs were 

 the chief subject ; he complained to a friend of his being bilious and 

 unwell, so unwell, he said, that he was as little able to comprehend 

 financial affairs as a member of the Bank committee. " As for bilious- 

 ness," he added, " it is unnecessary to carry that with one to the Diet, 

 it can easily be got there, and in fact belongs to the order of the 

 day." Tegne'r was still looked upon with such favour by his order, 

 that in 1839 he was one of the three candidates proposed for the 

 archbishopric of Upsal. Next year, alas ! he was the inmate of a 

 lunatic asylum. " God preserve my understanding," he had written 

 shortly before in a letter to one of his friends; "there runs a vein 

 of madness in my family. With me it has hitherto broken out in 

 poetry, which is a milder kind of madness, but who can give me the 

 assurance, that it will always take that way ? " A seclusion of some 

 months in an institution for the insane at Schleswig enabled him to 

 return in 1841 to his family, and partially to his duties, and he was 

 even able to preach so lately as June 1845, but after that he sunk 

 gradually. He was confined chiefly to his house and his room. He 

 lay on the sofa, in cheerful spirits, and passed his time in reading. 

 " About him," says Bottiger, " was generally seen a pile of books of 

 different sorts and sizes, from the old Greek folio to the last 

 fashionable novel, but some volumes of Ariosto and Walter Scott 

 were never wanting." After a stroke of paralysis and still weakened 

 health, he died without pain on the 2nd of November 1846, shortly 

 before midnight and during a beautiful appearance of the northern 

 lights. His wife turvived him, and he left six children, one of whom, 

 a daughter, is married to Professor Bottiger of Upsal. Bottiger is 

 himself a poet, and one of his best-known pieces is a description of a 

 little incident which occurred to him in the Bay of Naples, where 

 having been interested by witnessing the emotions which a stranger 

 evinced over a book he was reading, and afterwards finding the book 

 lying where the stranger had left it, he took it up and found it was 

 'Frithiofs Saga.' TegneYs father, as we have seen, he had lost in 1792 ; 

 his mother survived till 1836, when she died at the age of ninety. In 

 1822, when the king of Sweden, Bernadotte, was returning from a 

 visit to Norway, he heard that TegneYs mother lived in a village he 

 was passing through, expressed a desire for an interview, and told her 

 that she had given birth to a son of whom she and Sweden might be 

 proud. The mother of such a son however had passed most of her 

 life in anxiously tending on another son, the poor idiot Johannes, 

 who at last in an unguarded moment walked into a river and was 

 drowned. 



The works of Tegner were collected and published in six volumes 

 by his son-in-law Professor Bottiger (Stockholm, 1847-48). Nearly 

 three of the volumes are occupied by his smaller poems, two by prose 

 works, chiefly speeches, and extracts from letters, and a volume and a 

 half by the larger poems, on which the reputation of Tegne'r is chiefly 

 founded, and by a biography of the poet, from which we have taken 

 most of our details. The smaller poems are many of them occasional 

 verses on subjects of slight importance, but some are vigorous and 

 interesting. One of his earliest is on ' Pitt and Nelson,' both of whom 

 are objects of strong condemnation, Nelson being called ' the Tamer- 

 lane of the Sea;' another, remarkably well written, is a dialogue 

 between England and France, vituperating each other, in which 

 England has decidedly the worst of the fray. The sympathies of 

 Tegne'r seem to have been extremely limited, his contempt for 

 Germans and Germany is repeatedly expressed, and it would be 

 difficult to find in his writings praise of any country but his own, 

 which, except on a tour for health to Carlsbad in 1833, was the only 

 one he had ever seen, or apparently ever wished to see. Iu one of 

 his letters he even declares his aversion to Stockholm as that hateful 

 object a "large small town." His speeches are iu great reputation 

 both in Sweden and Germany for their lucidity and eloquence. They 

 were chiefly delivered at anniversaries of grammar-schools and ou 

 similar occasions, and are of much the same character as those 

 delivered in England and America at mechanics institutes, &c., and 

 bearing on the same class of subjects the benefits of education, the 

 utility of particular studies, &c. Of the larger poems, ' Frithiof," 

 ' Axel,' and the ' Children of the Lord's Supper,' the English reader 

 has an opportunity of forming almost as good a judgment as the 

 Swedish. No foreign poet has been so fortunate as Tegne'r in his 

 English translators. Of 'Frithiof' there are at least five versions, 

 more in number than we have of any other foreign poem of this 

 century, and several of them are good. The first, by the Rev. William 

 Strong, published in 1833, is undoubtedly tho worst, but is still the 

 work of a man of learning, and of an enthusiast for his original ;^an 

 anonymous one, by several hands, which appeared in Paris in 18357 is 

 apparently in part by Frye, who deserves more notice than he haa met 

 with ; a third, by R. G. Latham, in 1838, though not equal to Latham's 

 ' Axel,' is a fair representation of the original ; a fourth, by G. Stephens, 

 now Professor of English at the University of Copenhagen, was issued 

 at Stockholm in 1841, and accompanied by a letter from Tegner to say 

 that he thought it the best English translation of himself he had seen ; 

 a fifth, by Oscar Baker, in 1841, possesses considerable merit. . 

 possible that the English reader, on the perusal of some of these, may 



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