ADAM GOTTLÖB, the greatest poet and dramatist of Denmark, was born at Westerbrog, a suburb of Copenhagen, on the 14th of November 1779. He was named after his father's patron, Count Adam Gottlob Moltke, who had secured for the elder Oehlenschläger the place of organist, and afterwards that of steward of the royal chateau of Fredericksborg. This palace, distant about two miles from Copenhagen, and built, it is said, after the design of Inigo Jones, was a favourite resort of the court in summer, but in winter was left to the solitary occupation of the poet's parents, two watchmen, and a couple of dogs. Here the boy grew up; and he was fond of recording in later years the delight with which he used to traverse the stately but deserted apartments, feeding his childish eye with gazing on the portraits of heroes and kings, and imagining for himself a brilliant future of fortune and fame. Here he acquired such rudimentary knowledge as the dame's school and the parish clerk could furnish, and he was allowed to read whatever came in his way, or could be found to his taste in a circulating library of the capital, to which he was permitted by his father to make exploring expeditions on fine days. His reading lay chiefly in romances, old and new. Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones shared his favour with the Arabian Nights and Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer; and he knew the Comedies of Holberg, the German Molière, almost by heart. In boyhood, as in after life, he felt the beauties of nature deeply, and was quick in the perception of character. The beautiful suburb in which he lived a free and rambling life gratified his sense of natural beauty; and even in the narrow and homely circle of his father's friends he found scope for the exercise of his faculty of observation. The power of improvisation, and the impulse to convey his own ideas and impressions to others, so often developed in boyhood and lost in after years, showed itself early in him; and before he was twelve years of age he was overheard by the clergyman preaching in the chapel to an imaginary audience with so much effect, that his unexpected auditor urged his parents to educate him for the church. To give him an education in the capital was, however, beyond his father's humble means. Fortunately for his future career, his talents attracted the notice of Edward Storm, the Norwegian poet, who procured his admission as a free scholar into the School for Posterity in Copenhagen, of which Storm was superintendent. Here the same activity of mind continued to be shown; but Latin and history suffered not a little beside the stronger attractions of poetry and the drama. Oehlenschläger's mind was not one to pursue any study with method, or to follow it into its depths. His curiosity and thirst for knowledge, always active, was quickly satisfied, and as quickly started off in search of some new object. As his boyhood advanced, the dramatic faculty became more developed. The characters he imagined, he was irresistibly compelled to embody and to put into action. Thus he used to write little pieces to be acted by himself and his playfellows, among whom he soon became a favourite and a leader. His facility of composition was even then remarkable. "My dear boy," Storm said to him once with quiet irony, "you are a greater poet than Molière. It used to be thought a feat in him to write and bring out a piece in eight days; you dash it off with ease in one." Storm, with whom he was a favourite, looked after his studies for three of the four years he remained at the Posterity School, when death deprived him of the poet's kind and thoughtful friendship. Oehlenschläger took a fair place among his fellow-students; and, despite his desultory habits and imaginative pursuits, he acquired during this period a fair knowledge of history, geography, and his mother tongue; he was well up in geometry and trigonometry, had mastered German, knew something of French, and had gained a superficial knowledge of some of the sciences. At the age of sixteen Oehlenschläger was confirmed, and left the school; and now the question arose, to what he was to turn? His father's scanty means made it important that the boy should be speedily put in the way of earning his own livelihood. Commerce was talked of; but a merchant without money was, as his mother said, like a violin without strings. Oehlenschläger, besides, knew nothing of English, then, as now, the great language of trade; and arithmetic had always been his stumbling-block. A vacancy, however, was heard of in the counting-house of a friend at Christianshafen, and thither Oehlenschläger, with a heavy heart, went with his father. To his infinite satisfaction they found that the young man whose place he was to fill had resumed his duties, and they had to return as they went. On the way back Oehlenschläger persuaded his father, whose disposition was easy to a fault, to allow him to prosecute at home the studies necessary to enable him to take his degree in arts. To these he applied himself for some time with zeal, taking lessons in Greek and Latin from the tutor of the sons of the gardener at Fredericksborg; but his progress in these severer studies was not great. The Muses continued to assert their mastery over him, and his scanty pocket-money was expended upon plays and visits to the theatre. Despairing of success in any other career, he determined to go upon the stage, for which he was in some measure prepared by his practice in the plays which he had been in the habit of performing with his companions. Having with some difficulty obtained his parents' consent to this step, and secured from the necessary authority an admission to the court theatre at Copenhagen, he made his appearance, after a course of preliminary study under the direction of Rosing, then the leading actor there. He continued on the Copenhagen stage for nearly two years; but his success was simply respectable, and not such as to reconcile him to the difficulties and anxieties of a profession for which he had manifestly no peculiar vocation. His office was to write plays, not to act them. A variety of little circumstances combined to make his position in the theatre irksome. Rising alone seems to have entertained hopes of him as an actor. This was not enough for Oehlenschläger, and he threw up his engagement, after having remained on the stage just long enough to learn something of the technical requirements of the art for which he was afterwards to minister such admirable materials. About this time, too, he had made the acquaintance of the brothers Ørsted, one of whom afterwards married his sister. Their habits of methodical and profound study impressed him deeply. He had seen nothing like it before, and, contrasting their attainments with his own, he was stimulated to retrieve, if possible, the time which he had lost. To this he was encouraged by these gifted brothers; and, under the guidance of Anders Sandoe Ørsted, he devoted himself for a time with ardour to the study of jurisprudence, and passed the preliminary examinations with credit. Oehlenschläger was still only nineteen, and his poetic powers had been quickened into action by the loss of his mother, whom he loved tenderly and deeply, and by an attachment which he formed for his first and only love, Christiana Georgina Elizabeth Heger, the daughter of the Counsellor Heger. Literature soon divided his attention with the studies of law. He read much, especially in the authors of the great German school, which had recently sprung up; and his writings, both in verse and prose, began to attract attention. He associated with men of letters, and gave much attention to the study of northern antiquities, mythology, and literature. The expedition of the British fleet against Copenhagen for a time interrupted these peaceful studies. Oehlenschläger joined a corps of volunteers, and has left an amusing account of their amateur military career. This temporary distraction over, he returned with renewed activity to his former literary pursuits, and in 1803 published his first volume of poetry. Some of its contents are worthy of his subsequent fame; but it was not until the appearance of his dramatic poem of Aladdin in 1804 that he gave the assurance of realizing the boast with which, in a moment of enthusiasm, he had on one occasion startled and amused his companions, that he would one day rescue Danish poetry from the decay into which it had fallen since the days of Ewald. This work bears the unmistakable impress of genius. The luxuriance of fancy, the freshness and exuberance of feeling, the variety and truth of the characters, the spontaneousness of emotion, and the pervading sense of power, reconcile the reader to its want of compression and occasional feebleness of execution. All the wealth of a lively and sensitive nature is scattered lavishly over its pages. In the composition of this work Oehlenschläger felt that nature had destined him for a poet, and not for a lawyer. His countrymen took the same view; and, through the interest of Count Schimmelman, he obtained from the Danish government a travelling pension in August 1805. With this he made a tour through Germany, where he made the acquaintance of Goethe and Wieland, and the brilliant circle whom the old Duchess Amelia had gathered around her at Weimar. At Halle he wrote his Hakon Jarl, his second play, in six weeks. At Goethe's suggestion he translated the Aladdin into German, and he dedicated his translation to that poet in lines of great beauty. He followed the same course with reference to all his principal plays, revising as he translated them, so that they frequently appear to more advantage in their German than in their Danish dress. From Weimar he went to Paris, where he wrote his Palnatok, and Azel und Wallburg, dramas unsurpassed by any of his later works. Here, too, he conceived the idea of his Correggio, the first and best of the long line of art-dramas in which Germany has since been prolific, although it was in Parma that this fine work fitly took a definite shape, which was afterwards perfected in Rome. After an absence of five years, Oehlenschläger returned in 1810 to Copenhagen, where he was already famous, and an enthusiastic reception awaited him. He had endowed some of the finest national legends with a noble dramatic life, and laid the foundation of a national drama of the best kind. His countrymen were proud of him, and at this early period, as through all the rest of his long life, were not sparing in their demonstrations of regard. He was appointed professor of aesthetics at the university of Copenhagen,—a position which he continued to fill with honour till nearly the close of his life. On the 10th of May 1810 he married Christiana Heger, to whom he had been so long betrothed, and whom, after the companionship of many years of uninterrupted happiness, he lived to regret. From the time of his return to Copenhagen, Oehlenschläger's life was one unbroken career of literary labour and of literary honour. He wrote much in nearly all departments of the belles lettres,—poems, dramas (serious and comic), operettas, tales, and novels. It is by his dramas, however, that posterity will know him. Besides comedies and operas, he wrote twenty-four tragedies, of which nineteen are on Scandinavian themes. These are of various and unequal merit; but all are more or less deserving of perusal, and some will rank among the first in the first class of modern dramas. Like all dramatists of the highest order, Oehlenschläger himself is not seen in the best of his works. His characters feel and speak with a spontaneousness, and truth to the situation, which make the reader forget the author in the living reality of the scene. The art to blot, however, was one which Oehlenschläger seems never to have learned. As the first impulse came, so he wrote; and his writings accordingly bear many traces of feebleness, which a more vigorous judgment would have been at pains to remove. Oehlenschläger was scarcely less esteemed in Sweden than in Denmark. In the summer of 1829 he visited that country, where he was greeted by all classes with a burst of enthusiasm such as commonly is bestowed only on conquerors or kings. He was met on the high road by a procession of students. Addresses were presented to him from all quarters. At the distribution of degrees in the ancient cathedral of Lund, Bishop Tegner, the greatest poet of Sweden, saluted him with a panegyric in hexameters in which he was hailed as the king of the poets of the north, and placed a laurel crown upon his head amidst a storm of music and artillery. Soon afterwards he was made a knight of the North Star by the King of Sweden, and received the diploma of doctor of philosophy from the university of Lund. Ovations not less gratifying awaited him on a subsequent visit to Sweden, and also to Norway. In 1813 he received from the King of Denmark the knighthood of Dannebrog, and in 1839 he was appointed counsellor of state. Other and higher honours were subsequently conferred upon him in his own country; and from the sovereigns of Sweden, Prussia, and Belgium he received similar distinctions. A great festival was held at Copenhagen on the 14th November 1849, in honour of his seventieth birthday, on which occasion he recited a poetical address, in which he said,

"Although the end far distant may not be, There's life and sinew in the old man yet; To you I drink, and drain the cup with glee, For 'tis no funeral feast that here is set."

He was then in the full enjoyment of all his powers, and was even then busy with literary tasks. But about six weeks afterwards symptoms of a breaking up of the constitution appeared; and he died on the 20th of January 1850. About an hour and a half before his death he requested his son to read to him that part of the scene in the fifth act of his tragedy of Socrates, where the philosopher speaks of death. "It is," he said, "so unspeakably beautiful." He heard the passage read with deep emotion, "and with a smile," says the biographer, "of rapturous delight." When it was concluded, he put an end to the reading, and took leave of his family. The incident is characteristic, not as has been said, of the poet's vanity, but of his simple faith, which regarded himself only as the medium through which an inspiration from a higher source spoke. So it was with Oehlenschläger through life. His poetry flowed from him under an inspiration as unconscious, and often as fitful, as music from the wind-swept chords of an Æolian lyre. When the mood passed, he seems to have rarely set himself to the task of rejecting what was weak or indifferent, or heightening by the touches of art what had been left imperfect in the heat of composition. Oehlenschläger's death was felt as a national loss, and his obsequies were celebrated with almost regal honours. A funeral oration was pronounced over his remains by the Bishop of Seeland in the cathedral of Copenhagen, and they were then borne to the church of Fredericksborg attended by a crowd of more than 20,000 people, or about a sixth of the entire population of the capital. The prince royal, the royal aides-de-camp, the whole diplomatic body, all the clergy, and the different guilds of arts and manufactures, swelled the train; and the coffin was borne by the youth of the public schools. Thus royally attended, the great Scandinavian bard was laid to rest in the grave of his fathers on the 26th January 1850.

Oehlenschläger was robust in body as in mind,—a burly man, with a large head, and features which beamed with intelligence and vivacity. He seemed to be rather a child of the sunny south than of the north. His complexion was tinged with ruddy bronze, his eyes were dark and brilliant, his smile full and joyous, his gestures animated and quick. His sensibilities were at all times readily moved. He enjoyed keenly, and his sympathies were wide and genial. There was to the last much of the child in him; and in the midst of their admiration his friends were often moved to smile at his harmless egotism. Rarely has a poet's life been happier, or more in harmony with his nature. Born poor, he was fortunate in the love of parents with whom he grew up in an atmosphere of simplicity, integrity, and piety. He was fortunately enabled by well-timed patronage to follow from the first the instincts of his genius. His country early recognised his claims. Placed by it in a position to pursue his literary career without anxiety, he was cheered through life by the assurance that his efforts were watched with interest, and welcomed with hearty sympathy. Rich in purse he never was; but he was rich in the love of a wife to whom he was devoted, and of children who caused him no regrets,—rich in the possession of all his powers of mind and body to the close of a long life,—rich in the love of honoured friends, and in the admiration of his country. In him genius was happily allied with goodness; and the world dealt kindly with the man whom nature had endowed with many of her choicest gifts.

(π. m.—n.)