th sides of the Atlantic, it is comparatively rare. That a
vigorous race like the Danish, confined, as it is in modern times,
within a narrow arena of action (and forbidden to do anything on that),
should have developed it to a rare perfection seems, as I have already
remarked, almost a psychological necessity.

Holger Drachmann, in his capacity of lyrist, has also a strain of the
Hamlet nature; although, in the case of a poet, whose verses are in
themselves deeds, the assertion contains no reproach. I am not even sure
that the Protean quality of Drachmann's verse--its frequent voicing of
naturally conflicting tendencies--need be a matter of reproach. A poet
has the right to sing in any key in which he can sing well; and
Drachmann sings, as a rule, exceedingly well. But, like most people with
a fine voice, he is tempted to sing too much; and it thus happens that
verses of slipshod and hasty workmanship are to be found in his volumes.
In his first book of "Poems" he was a free oppositional lance, who
carried on a melodious warfare against antiquated institutions and
opinions, and gave a thrust here and a thrust there in behalf of
socialists, communists, and all sorts of irregular characters. Since
that time his radical, revolutionary sympathies have had time to cool,
and in each succeeding volume he has appeared more sedate, conservative,
_bourgeois_.[25] In a later volume of poems this transformation is half
symbolically indicated in the title, "Tempered Melodies." Nor is it to
be denied that his melodies have gained in beauty by this process of
tempering. There is a wider range of feeling, greater charm of
expression, and a deeper resonance. Half a dozen volumes of verse which
he has published since ("Songs of the Ocean," "Venezia," "Vines and
Roses," "Youth in Verse and Song," "Peder Tordenskjold," "Deep Chords")
are of very unequal worth, but establish beyond question their author's
right to be named among the few genuine poets of the latter half of the
nineteenth century; nay, more than that, he belongs in the foremost rank
of those who are yet surviving. His prose, on the other hand, seems
aimless and chaotic, and is not stamped with any eminent
characteristics. A volume of short stories, entitled "Wild and Tame,"
partakes very much more of the latter adjective than of the former. The
first of the tales, "Inclined Planes," is a discursive family chronicle,
showing the decadence of a fishing village under the influen