Danish literature around the mid 1750s is characterized by two currents that ran parallel to each other throughout a major part of the century. The first current is represented by rationalistic- and Classicist-oriented writers, such as Ludvig Holberg, most of them prose writers and true adherents of European Enlightenment. The second current is represented by more-emotional and religiously oriented writers, mostly lyrical poets, such as hymn writers Hans Adolph Brorson and Ambrosius Stub. Through their deep-felt Christianity these poets in many ways can be regarded as successors of the preceding German-oriented Baroque literature; through their refined and elegant style, however, they are also heralds of the more sentimental trends of around 1800 and the succeeding Romanticism.

Ambrosius Christoffersen Stub was born in 1705 in the village of Gummerup on the island of Fyn. His exact birth date is not known, but he was baptized on 17 May. His father was a...