A strong spiritual kinship drew him to Schiller, whose splendor of
imagery and impassioned rhetoric were the very gifts which he himself in
a superlative degree possessed. The breath of political and religious
liberalism which pervades the writings of the German poet was also
highly congenial to Tegner, and last, but not least, they were both
light-loving, beauty-worshipping Hellenists, and, though externally
conformists, hid joyous pagan souls under imperfect Christian draperies.
Small blame it is therefore to Tegner that Schiller's poems furnished
him with frequent suggestions and sometimes also with metres. Schiller
had, in "The Gods of Greece," sung a glorious elegy on the Olympian age
which stimulated his Swedish rival to write "The Asa Age," in which he
regretted, though in a rather half-hearted way, the disappearance of
Odin, Thor, and Freya. The poem, it must be admitted, falls much below
Tegner at his best. Schiller's "Three Words of Faith," in which liberty,
virtue, and God are declared to be the only essentials of religion,
finds a parallel (which even retains the metre) in Tegner's "The
Eternal," in which truth, justice, and beauty are substituted.
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