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tion that his mother-tongue is fully the equal of German in that respect would probably not be sharply criticised by anyone familiar with the literatures in both.
2. The literature. In drawing parallels in the literary field it must be remembered how seriously handicapped is the author writing in a language understood by but a few million people. Beyond the narrow confines of his native state known, if at all, through translations only, in whose approximations the essence of his stylistic individuality so intimately bound up with the medium of expression is always volatilized and often entirely lost, he enters the arena under conditions making a full apprecia- tion next to impossible. Taking due account of this fact, it may well be questioned whether, aside from the three great language areas English, French, and German any nation, irrespective of size, has ever unfolded a more prolific and variegated, yet withal original and strong, literary activity than this little people numbering barely two million and a half. True, Den- mark has not produced a Shakespeare. Neither has Germany. But Oehlenschlager, the greatest literary genius of the North, though inferior to Goethe in versatility and depth, has created works which in poetic qualities and mastery of language will bear comparison with those of the Weimar statesman-poet. The playwright Holberg, who in the eighteenth century became the founder of the Danish stage, has no rival in Germany in dra- matic force and caustic wit.
The "golden age" of Danish literature, covering the last decades of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, like that of Germany coincided with a period of politi- cal distress and economic depression. To the generations of bril- liant writers, of the then prevailing romantic school, which sprang up in those years, inspired by national ideals and extending over the whole range of literary categories, belong, besides that of Oehlenschlager, such names as Ewald and Baggesen, Grundtvig and Ingemann, Heiberg and Hertz, Hauch and Paludan-Miiller, Steen Blicher and Goldschmidt, Aarestrup and Christian Win- ther names all of which would be classed among the best in the literature of any country.
