Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Literature, by Chr. Brinchmann
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has been proofread at least once.
(diff)
(history)
Denna sida har korrekturlästs minst en gång.
(skillnad)
(historik)
sister had grown up, whose names now shine as the radiant
morning stars of the new golden age. At the age of twenty, the
brother suddenly burst through the grey dawn of morning like a
flaming meteor, whose rays were already extinguished, after a
brief seventeen years of exuberant production, in a never-fading
sea of light, when his more despondent sister, as a widow of the
age of forty, threw back her veil, and revealed a literary
physiognomy, whose radiance continued to shine in advanced age. These
were Henrik Wergeland and his sister Camilla. And at the same
time another young genius appeared as Wergelands implacable
rival, inheriting, after his death, the poet’s crown. This was Johan
Sebastian Welhaven.
Under this glittering constellation, poetry opened her eyes
in regenerated Norway. It was in the years between Byron’s and
Goethe’s death; but the new-born Norwegian muse was too bright
and intrepid either to be infected with the passionate, torturing
world-pains of the former, or to sink into the Olympic repose of
the latter.
Henrik Wergeland rushed into life, intoxicated with ecstasy
over its fullness, a youth more light of heart than the
lightest-hearted, and yet of a deep and manly intellect, to whom existence
revealed its seriousness and its claim to the devotion of the whole
personality. A hopeless affection concentrated the feelings of this
youth of eighteen upon a fertile point, and inspired a dithyrambic
lyric, whose rich and splendid metaphors were a reflection of his
fanatical enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s poetic diction. Once
emancipated, his imagination soared boldly up to the giddy heights of
poetical cosmogony, whence his flashing intellect beheld life with all
its strong contrasts transfigured as a radiation of the measureless
love whose sparks smouldered in his own sensitive breast. At the
age of twenty-two, after having taken his theological degree in
1829, he poured out, in the course of one month, the bursting
fulness of his fiery soul in a gigantic improvisation covering 700
pages — «Skabelsen, Mennesket og Messias» (The Creation, Man,
and the Messiah) — an epos of humanity, brought forth under
intoxication in the dreams of liberty that at the time of the July
Revolution, gave the enthusiastic spirits of the age wings to fly
towards the gates of the millennium. But alas, how many
comprehended the crowded allegory, whose bewildering profusion of
images dazzled the sight like a host of sea-birds, startled from
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
