self up to his present eminence with an energy of character which does him high honour. A brief glance at his progress will demonstrate this.

Bernard von Beskow was the son of a wealthy merchant and iron-founder. He was born in Stockholm in 1796, and in his youth was well instructed in painting and music. He entered the Royal Chancery in 1814, became secretary there, and afterwards private secretary to the Crown Prince. In 1826 he was raised to the rank of nobility; in 1827, was made Gentleman of the Chamber ; and in 1833, Court Marshal. He afterwards was made Director of the Theatre, and brought many excellent pieces upon the stage. He was made member of the Academy, and has been since 1834 its secretary. He made extensive travels through Europe in 1820—1 and 1827-8, and cultivated the acquaintance of the most celebrated men in Europe. In 1818, he published two volumes of original poems; and these were followed at different times by the tragedies of" Erik XIV. ;" of "Hildegarde;" "Torkel Knutson;" which has been by some critics pronounced the best acting drama that Sweden possesses; and "King Birger and his Race." Some of these were translated by Oehlenschläger into Danish and German. His opera, "The Troubadour," was set to music by the Crown Prince, now King. In 1832, he published "Recollections of his Wanderings," in two volumes, and he has been an active writer in almost all the Swedish periodicals and papers. In 1842, he was honoured with the title of Doctor of Philosophy. Throughout Bernard von Beskow's writings there prevails a generous, patriotic and liberal spirit.

Assar Lindblad, who was born in 1800, is a clergyman in Scania. He commenced his career by too decidedly broad imitations of Tegnér; but his poems, published in Lund, 1832, display much real genius.

CHAPTER XIX.

POETS BELONGING GENERALLY TO THE NEW SCHOOL.

THE most prominent poets of this class are Stagnelius, Almquist, Livijn, Dahlgren and Fahlcrantz. It would be incorrect to allocate them with Phosphorists or Goths, for they differ both from these schools and from each other so decidedly, that they can only be styled writers of modern power, tendencies and spirit. They possess much of that independent and individual character which should be the result of the doctrine of every man endeavouring to develop his own genius according to his own inner impulses, and the perception of his own natural organization and endowments. The greatest of these poets is unquestionably—

ERIK JOHAN STAGNELIUS.

Stagnelius is a genuine modern gnostic. His poetry is as fully and as positively the enunciation of gnosticism as ever were the preachings of the old Syrian and Egyptian speculative Christians. Himself a physically suffering creature, with passions at war in his body with the intense heavenward longings of his soul, he was deeply impressed with the philosophy which the gnostic sect of the early

Christians inherited from Plato and Pythagoras, that our souls were once in a higher state of existence, and that, in the words of Byron, we all live in a place of penance :

"Where for our sins to sorrow we are cast."

It was the doctrine which Wordsworth drew from Plato in his noble Ode, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.

The farther he goes, the more the heavenly inborn light "fades into the light of common day."

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim;

The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her inmate man,
Forget the glories he hath known,

And the imperial palace whence he came.

This is the gnosticism of a man comfortably wandering amid the lakes and mountains of Cumberland, with a good old clerk issuing stamps to the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and leaving him no care except that of

receiving the rich percentage. But the gnosticism of Stagnelius was held under different circumstances. Cooped in a sickly body, contending with the higher instincts of the soul, "the homely nurse," old mother earth, did seem to him to have an "unworthy aim." Psyche, in his eyes, was in bondage to Hyle; the soul was in a stern prison to matter, which was constantly endeavouring to make her,

Forget the glories she had known,

And the imperial palace whence she came.”

Stagnelius did not, like Wordsworth, live out a serene life of upwards of seventy years, but his tried and conflicting existence terminated at the age of thirty. Therefore, we have no remoulding of his youthful doctrines, no calmer views evolved through the experience of longer and more tranquil years, but his thoughts and feelings stand before us, thrown off in the fire of youth, and the gloomy fervour with which the upward and the downward tendencies of complicated human nature inspired him.

The Swedish critics see a strong resemblance between Stagnelius and Wordsworth: we see more between him and Shelley. With the exception of the differing faiths, there is the same early fate, the same speculative spirit, the same attachment to Greek philosophy and Greek poetic forms. No one can read the "Cydippe," the "Narcissus," the "Bacchantes," "Proserpina," nor even his "Svedger," without being struck with this. There is the same yearning after the unknown, the same tendency to the mythic and speculative, the same constant warring of oppressed nature, which Shelley has expressed in his "Prometheus Unbound," against some overbearing power or element, and the same wonderful power of language and affluence of inspired phrase. In the very choice of the subject of the

"Riddertornet" and the "Cenci," we see a resemblance. But far more lies this kinship of spirit in the spirit itself, in those longings, despairings, those far flights into the ideal world and those sufferings from the real one, which marked them both.

Stagnelius was the son of a clergyman, afterwards Bishop of Kalmar. He was born in 1793; studied in Lund, and afterwards in Upsala, and became a Clerk of Chancery in the Ecclesiastical Department in 1815, and took successive advancements in that office. He died in Stockholm in 1828. In his lifetime he published "Women in the North," for which he received the prize of the Royal Academy. His "Wladimir," a fine heroic poem in hexameters, was published in 1817; his "Lilies of Sharon," in 1821; his "Bacchantes," in 1822; and, after his death, his "Collected Writings" were published in three volumes by Hammarsköld.

They are his Lilies of Sharon which distinguish him from all other Swedish poets, and place him amongst the greatest intellectual poets of the age. Some of the critics of his native country complain of the gloom and the sorrowful tone of his poetry, and are inclined to regard it as sickly. To our fancy, it is much too strong and wrestling in its nature to be sickly. That there is a tone of suffering running through the greater part of his productions, is true; for it was the lot of Stagnelius preeminently to present an example of the truth of Shelley's declaration, that

"We learn in suffering

What we teach in song."

We are, therefore, more pleased with the serious portions of his poetry than with the rest. The world has a superflux, and Sweden especially, of the light, the play