yful music rises, and where scarlet curtains fall!
Oh, might we live together in a cottage mean and small,
With sods of grass the only roof, and mud the only wall!

O lovely Mary Donnelly, your beauty's my distress:
It's far too beauteous to be mine, but I'll never wish it less.
The proudest place would fit your face, and I am poor and low;
But blessings be about you, dear, wherever you may go!

From 'Ballads and Songs.'

KARL JONAS LUDVIG ALMQUIST

(1793-1866)

Almquist, one of the most versatile writers of Sweden, was a man of
strange contrasts, a genius as uncertain as a will-o'-the-wisp. His
contemporary, the famous poet and critic Atterbom, writes:--

"What did the great poets of past times possess which upheld
them under even the bitterest worldly circumstances? Two
things: one a strong and conscientious will, the other a
single--not double, much less manifold--determination for
their work, oneness. They were not self-seekers; they sought,
they worshiped something better than themselves. The aim
which stood dimly before their inmost souls was not the
enjoyment of flattered vanity; it was a high, heroic symbol
of love of honor and love of country, of heavenly wisdom. For
this they thought it worth while to fight, for this they even
thought it worth while to suffer, without finding the
suffering in itself strange, or calling earth to witness
thereof.... The writer of 'Toernrosens Bok' [The Book of the
Rose] is one of these few; he does therefore already reign
over a number of youthful hearts, and out of them will rise
his time of honor, a time when many of the celebrities of the
present moment will have faded away."

Almquist was born in Stockholm in 1793. When still a very young man he
obtained a good official position, but gave it up in 1823 to lead a
colony of friends into the forests of Vaermland, where they intended to
return to a primitive life close to the heart of nature. He called this
colony a "Man's-home Association," and ordained that in the primeval
forest the members should live in turf-covered huts, wear homespun, eat
porridge with a wooden spoon, and enact the ancient freeholder. The
experiment was not successful, he tired of the manual work, and
returning to Stockholm, became master of the new Elementary School, and
began to write text-books and educational