A new feature was introduced into Swedish poetry by Runeberg.  Although born of Swedish parents, he was brought up in Finland, his mind being nurtured in the traditions and the mixed racial influences of his new fatherland.  Thus he breathed a new spirit, and a new inspiration, drawn from the realities of life, into poetical fiction.  He was a realist in the best sense of that much-misused word.  He sought his ideals in life, instead of outside of it and above it in imaginary creations.  He saw nature such as it is, with all its faults and sublimities, and, loving it with a true poet’s devotion, he painted it simply and faithfully, without aiming at ennobling it, but seeking and finding what there is of native dignity in its humblest expressions.  In his lyrical poem, The Sayings of Sergeant Stal, he portrayed incidents of the wars of Finland fighting by the side of Sweden in 1809, when the country was conquered by Russia.  It was a series of war pictures, a collection of hero types, painted in living colors, and breathing the most ardent patriotism.—­Simple tales told by a sergeant of his recollections of the war, they deal with real personages, most of them drawn from the humblest stations in life, described just as they really lived and spoke and acted.  Yet throughout the story of their simple acts and thoughts there swept a breeze which kindled the blood, roused the emotions; and fired the patriotic feeling of Runeberg’s contemporaries.  In poetic depth and beauty of language, as in style and conception, and in their departure from all the prevailing ideas and methods of romanticism, these lyric tales were a revelation.  They classed their author at once as in the line of true-born poets.  The works of Runeberg, although properly belonging to the literature of a country politically no longer one with Sweden, have from the nature of their subjects and the identity of languages, always been looked upon in Sweden as common property, and they have certainly exercised a powerful influence on Swedish thought and letters.  Some of his songs, set to music, are to this day sung as national anthems.

The last champion of dying romanticism was a sort of universal genius, eccentric, bizarre, unequal, a spirit out of harmony with itself, but gifted with the most wonderful imagination and power, K.J.L.  Almquist.  His life was as checquered as his writings were various.  In turn a clergyman, a schoolmaster, a journalist, and an exile, he has written volumes on almost every conceivable subject, from fiction, poetry, and history, to lexicography, pedagogy, and mathematics.  His stories, published in two series, under the common title of The Book of the Hedgerose, show powers of conception, imagination, and description such as are only to be found in Edgar Allen Poe.  His was an essentially revolutionary temperament.  He disdained all authority, and cavilled at all moral restraints.  He was in constant rebellion against