Edmund William Gosse

“ But the elder brother soon got tired and ran away, while the poet, after a series of extraordinary adventures, deserted to the Austrian army, where from being drummer he rose to being sergeant, and was only not made an officer because he was a Protestant. In 1760 he was weary of a soldier’s life and deserted again, getting safe back to Denmark. For the next two years he worked with great diligence at the university, but the Arense for whom he had gone through so much hardship and taken so much pains married another man almost immediately after Ewald’s final and very successful examination. ”

“ EWALD, JOHANNES (1743–1781) , the greatest lyrical poet of Denmark, was the son of a melancholy and sickly chaplain at Copenhagen, where he was born on the 18th of November 1743. At the age of eleven he was sent to school at Schleswig, his father’s birthplace, and returned to the capital only to enter the university in 1758. His father was by that time dead, and in his mother, a frivolous and foolish woman, he found neither sympathy nor moral support. At fifteen he fell passionately in love with Arense Hulegaard, a girl whose father afterwards married the poet’s mother ”

“ On the death of Frederick V., however, Ewald first appeared prominently as a poet; he published in 1766 three Elegies over the dead king, which were received with universal acclamation, and of which one, at least, is a veritable masterpiece. But his dramatic poem Adam og Eva (Adam and Eve) , by far the finest imaginative work produced in Denmark up to that time, was rejected by the Society of Arts in 1767 and was not published until 1769. ”