“ After some years of foreign travel, in 1848 he entered the Danish diplomatic service, and remained in it till 1851, when he returned to Copenhagen, where he became the chief of one of the departments of the Danish foreign office. He retired in 1866, and then went back to Iceland, where he passed the rest of his life, active in the politics and the literature of his native island. He died in 1896. He is the best ballad poet Iceland has produced. His poems are unaffected and mostly free from rhetoric, the besetting sin of Icelandic poets. ”