o deep to be
healed by a mere gesture.

One cannot deny, however, that the monarch had serious reason for his
action. Not only had Kingo violated his instructions but he had planned a
book that hardly could have proved satisfactory. It would have been both
too large and too expensive for common use. He himself, on the other
hand, had reason to complain that he had not been consulted before the
work, on which he had spent so much of his time and substance, was
summarily rejected. No doubt the king had acted with unseemly haste and
lack of consideration.

The work was now held in abeyance for a few years. But the need for a new
hymnal was too pressing to be permanently ignored. The king, therefore,
appointed Soeren Jonasson, a provost at the cathedral of Roskilde, to
undertake the work. Jonasson was known as an excellent translator of
German hymns, and the choice appeared reasonable. He worked fast and in
less than two years was able to present a draft of his work. This
contained a well balanced selection of the old hymns and about twenty new
hymns by himself and various German authors, but not a single hymn by
Kingo. The omission no doubt reflects the envy that the poet's quick rise
to fame had stirred up against him in certain influential circles. His
enemies, however, had overshot their mark. Even the king realized that it
would be impossible at this time to publish a hymnal that ignored the
work of the country's greatest hymnwriter. And so Jonasson's work
promptly shared the fate of his predecessor's.

The troublesome problem now rested again for a few years until it was
revived by the zealous efforts of the king's chaplain, Peter Jespersen, a
close friend of the Norwegian hymnwriter, Peter Dass and himself a native
of the northern country.

A committee was appointed to prepare and publish a new hymnal "that
should give due recognition" to the work of Kingo. Although it was not
specifically directed to do so, the committee proved its good will toward
the harshly treated poet by entering into correspondence with him and
asking him to forward the material he already possessed, and to write the
additional hymns that might be needed to complete the hymnal. With this
request Kingo gladly complied, hoping that thus after all the greater
part of his work would be put to use. In this, however, he was
disappointed. When the hymnal finally appeared it contained 297 hymns of
which only 85 were by Kingo. This represented, it