Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/789

O E L (E N O 731 a grant for foreign travel from the Government, and he left his native country for the first time, joining Stetfens at Halle in August 1805. Here he wrote the first of his great historical tragedies, Hakon Jarl, which he sent off to Copenhagen, and then proceeded for the winter months to Berlin, where he associated with Humboldt, Ficlite, and the leading men of the day. In the spring of 1806 he went on to Weimar, where he spent several months in daily intercourse with Goethe. The autumn of the same year he spent with Tieck in Dresden, and proceeded in Decem ber to Paris. Here he resided eighteen months and wrote his three famous masterpieces, Baldur hin Gode, Palnatoke (1807), and Axel og Valborg (1808). In July 1808 he left Paris and spent the autumn and winter in Switzerland as the guest of Madame de Stael-Holstein at Coppet, in the midst of her famous circle of wits. In the spring of 1809 Oehlenschlager went to Rome to visit Thorwaldsen, and in his house wrote his tragedy of Correggio, in German ; he translated this into Danish the following year. After an absence of nearly five years he hurriedly returned to Den mark in the spring of 1810, partly to take the chair of (esthetics at the university of Copenhagen, partly to marry the sister-in-law of Rahbek, to whom he had been long betrothed. His first course of lectures dealt with his Danish predecessor Evald, the second with Schiller. From this time forward his literary activity became very great ; in 1811 he published the Oriental tale of Ali og Gulhyndi, and in 1812 the last of his great tragedies, Stserkodder. From 1814 to 1819 he, or rather his admirers, were engaged in a long and angry controversy with Baggesen, who repre sented the old didactic school. This contest seems to have disturbed the peace of Oehlenschlager s mind, and to have undermined his genius. His talent may be said to have culminated in the glorious cycle of verse -romances called Jfelye, published in 1814. The tragedy of Hagbarth og Signe, 1815, showed a distinct falling-off in style. In 1817 he went back to Paris, and published Hroars Saga and the tragedy of Fostbrodrene. In 1818 he was again in Copen hagen, and wrote the idyll of Den lille Hyrdedreng and the Eddaic cycle called Nordens Guder. His next productions were the tragedies of Erik og Abel (1820) and V&ringerne i MUdagaard (1826), and the epic of Hrolf Krake (1829). It was in the last -mentioned year that, being in Sweden, Oehlenschlager was publicly crowned with laurel in front of the high altar in Lund cathedral by Bishop Esaias Tegner, as the " Scandinavian King of Song." His last volumes were Tordenskjold (1833), Dronning Margrethe (1833), Sokrates (1835), Olaf den Hellige (1836), Knud den Store (1838), Dina (1842), Erik Glippiny (1843), and Kiartan og Gudrun (1847), none of which, with the ex ception, perhaps, of .Dina, can in any way be said to be worthy of his early reputation. On his seventieth birthday, 14th November 1849, a public festival was arranged in his honour, and he was decorated by the king of Denmark under circumstances of great pomp. Just two months later, on the 20th of January 1850, he sank, conscious to the last, and was buried in the cemetery of Frederiksberg. "With the exception of Holberg, there has been no Danish writer who has exercised so wide an influence as Oehlenschliiger. His great work was to awaken in the breasts of his countrymen an enthusiasm for the poetry and religion of their ancestors, and this he performed to so complete an extent that his name remains to this day synonymous with Scandinavian romance. He supplied his countrymen with romantic tragedies at the very moment when all eyes were turned to the stage, and when the old-fashioned pieces were felt to be inadequate. His plays, partly, no doubt, in consequence of his own early familiarity with acting, fulfilled the stage - requirements of the day, and were popular beyond all expectation. Several of them still keep the stage in spite of their rhetoric. The earliest are the best, Oehlenschlager s dramatic masterpiece being, without doubt, his first tragedy, Hakon Jarl. In his poems and plays alike his style is limpid, elevated, profuse ; his flight is sustained at a high pitch without visible excitement. His fluent tenderness and romantic zest have been the secrets of his extreme popularity. Although his inspiration came from Germany, he is not much like a German poet, except when he is consciously following Goethe ; his analogy is much rather to be found among the English poets, his contemporaries. His mission towards antiquity reminds us of Scott, but he is, as a poet, a better artist than Scott ; he has sometimes touches of exquisite diction and of overwrought sensibility which recall Coleridge to us. In his wide ambition and profuseness he possessed some characteristics of Southey, although his style has far more vitality. With all his faults he was a very great writer, one of the principal pioneers of the romantic move ment in Europe, and he will probably not cease to retain the posi tion which he won so easily at the summit of the Scandinavian Parnassus. (E. ^y. G ) OELS, the chief town of a circle in Prussian Silesia, and the capital of a mediatized principality of its own name, lies in a sandy plain on the Oelsa, 18 miles to the north east of Breslau. The prince s chateau, dating from 1558, contains a good library and a collection of pictures. The Schlosskirche was originally built about 980. The other buildings are unimportant. The inhabitants, numbering 10,157 in 1880, are chiefly engaged in making shoes and growing vegetables for sale at Breslau. There is also a manufactory of agricultural implements, and a trade is carried on in grain and flax. The town of Oels was founded about 940, and appears as the capital of an independent principality at the beginning of the 14th century. The principality, with an area of 750 square miles and about 150,000 inhabitants, passed through various hands and wns finally inherited by the ducal family of Brunswick in 1792. The present proprietor is the reigning duke of Brunswick. See W. Hiiusler, Geschichte lies Fiirstenthums Odi (Breslau, 1883). (EXANTHIC ACID AND ETHER. Liebig and Pelouze, by distilling large quantities of wine, obtained from the very last fractions of the distillate an oil which in a very high degree exhibited the generic smell common to all wines, the smell which a small remnant of any kind of wine left in an open bottle exhibits after the " bouquet " is gone. They recognized the oil as the ethyl-ether of a particular acid of the composition (C 14 H 2 , ; 3 )H 2 , which they called " oenanthic acid." An oil similar to Liebig and Pelouze s oenanthic ether was isolated by Wohler from quince-peel. Liebig and Pelouze s results were called in question by Delffs, who by experiments of his own arrived at the result that their cenanthic acid is identical with pelargonic, C,,H 17 0. 2 . H, which latter is known as a com ponent of the volatile oil of Pelargonium roseum. A. Fischer examined an " oenanthic ether " manufactured by Lichtenberger at Hambach in the Rhenish Palatinate, and found it to be a mixture of the ethyl-ethers of caprylic and capric acids, C 8 H 1(j O 2 and C 10 H 20 O 2 , and fatty acids higher than capric. The general impression amongst chemical wine -specialists seems to be that Liebig and Pelouze s oenanthic acid was a mixture of capric, caprylic, and other fatty acids. The notion of oenanthic acid must not be mixed up with that of oenanthylic acid, C 7 H 13 O 2 . H, the acid of primary heptyl- alcohol, C 7 H 16 O. The aldehyde C 7 H 14 O, intermediate between the two, is procured by the destructive distillation of castor oil, and from it the acid is easily prepared by oxidation with dilute chromic acid. (ENOMAUS was king of Olympia, where his wooden house was still shown in the Altis, the sacred precinct, when Pausanias visited it. It was fated that he should be slain by the husband of his daughter Hippodamia. His father, the god Ares-Hippios, gave him winged horses swift as the wind, and he promised his daughter to the man who could outstrip him in the chariot race ; those suitors who were beaten died by his hand. Pelops, by the treachery of Myrtilus, the charioteer of (Enomaus, won the race and married Hippodamia. Pelops is conceived as a stranger from Asia Minor, and (Enomaus is obviously the repre sentative of a race of Ares-worshippers who were conquered by, or amalgamated with, an immigrant race, who brought