The Independent . chastenedstyle the exploits of his countrys his-tory. Finally in 1890 appeared, as Gosse very truly says, threevery great lyrical artists. Of theseHeidenstam is still surviving; the othertwo were Oscar Levertin and GustafFroding. Levertin had the mysticaltinge and the artistic delicacy of hisJewish ancestry. Naturally enough heis the least Swedish in tone of all thepoets named thus far. Froding, on theother hand, is rivaled only by Burns inhis ability to interpret the rough tragi-comedy of peasant life. To this facultyhe adds a wonderful command ofimaginative beauty
The Independent . chastenedstyle the exploits of his countrys his-tory. Finally in 1890 appeared, as Gosse very truly says, threevery great lyrical artists. Of theseHeidenstam is still surviving; the othertwo were Oscar Levertin and GustafFroding. Levertin had the mysticaltinge and the artistic delicacy of hisJewish ancestry. Naturally enough heis the least Swedish in tone of all thepoets named thus far. Froding, on theother hand, is rivaled only by Burns inhis ability to interpret the rough tragi-comedy of peasant life. To this facultyhe adds a wonderful command ofimaginative beauty and a personal noteas alternately humorous and patheticas life itself. Dissipation closed thecareer of this brilliant master and leftthe name of Froding to be hallowedwith equal admiration and regret. Heidenstam meanwhile, beginningwith hardly less acclaim in his firstpoetic volume Pilgrimage and Wan-deryears, had sufficient physical andspiritual stability to outlast his twocontemporaries. Like Snoilsky he first. Press Illustrating VERNER VON HEIDENSTAMWinner of the Nobel Prize for Literature struck an exotic note and later changedto one with a national ring. In histravels he learned to value the scenesof his birthplace as he might not havedone had he never left them. Conse-quently his two later volumes of lyricsare saturated with Sweden, both inpicture and in feeling. In prose as inpoetry Heidenstam turned from ro-manticism to patriotism. THE preceding sketch of recentSwedish poetry has been of littlevalue if it has not served to indi-cate that love of country is a prevail-ing characteristic of all the great mas-ters—Levertin being, on account of hisalien birth, an exception. If, then, allthe best Swedish poets are strongly na-tional, it becomes necessary to definethe nationalism of Heidenstam moreparticularly. How, for instance, doesit differ from that of Froding? To answer this question we mustglance for a moment at the contrastingtemperaments of the two. Froding isthe ty
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