But such a purpose is utterly futile, as long as the
poems themselves had once escaped into publicity.
It was during the period while his sky was yet unclouded that Tegner
enriched Swedish literature with a series of lyrics which in point of
lucidity of thought and brilliancy of diction have rarely been
surpassed. It may be admitted, without materially detracting from his
merit, that in some of them the foreign models from which they were in a
measure fashioned shimmer through. Just as the Germans, Gottsched and
Bodmer, held foreign models to be indispensable, and only disagreed as
to which were the best, so the Swedish Academy, which in its
predilections was French, had no scruple in recommending this or that
literary form for imitation. That degree of literary independence which
Germany reached with Goethe and Schiller, who discarded all models, the
Scandinavian countries did not reach until a much later period; and
Tegner was one of those who stimulated that national self-respect
without which independence is impossible.
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