It would be unjust to cite this last stanza as an adequate specimen of Tegnér's picturesque method; nevertheless there is something typical in it. Most of the similitudes produced by the fancy of Tegnér, so far exceed the brilliancy of nature, that to me they appear very much the same as the image he makes his Ingeborg weave of Fridthjofs falcon:-- "Here on his hand, Work I thy form on the cloth's broad band; Pinions of silver, and glowing Gold talons sewing."[6] With a predilection of this kind, something conventional and stiff can scarcely be avoided. The inclination to transform every idea into a figure beguiles Tegnér, in uninspired moments, into a common-place use of once-applied similes, which keep recurring in an almost stereotyped way. Thus he has (merely to keep to the birds) a few bird forms which he never wearies of dragging in eagle, nightingale, and dove. They stand as equivalents for strength, poetry, and piety. The eagle used for this purpose by Tegnér retains no more of the nature of the real eagle than may be seen in the eagles that adorn royal escutcheons; Tegnér's eagle is purely heraldic. In his poetry may be found lines like these: "Alas! poor Psyche, fly as she will, on earth she is but an eagle with butterfly's pinions"; or similes like the following: "Within her throat a nightingale she carried, and a snow-white dove by night and by day did linger in her bosom." An eagle with butterfly pinions is a creature totally contrary to nature, and when a nightingale is firmly fixed in a female throat, it does not exactly contribute to the perspicuity of the thought. In his address on entering the Swedish Academy, he defends himself figurative language. He emphatically pronounces it to be the aim of poetry to offer images, not ideas, to the imagination, and considers it the character of language to be a gallery of faded pictures which the poet must of necessity revive. In this he is far from wrong, although he would have done well to take to heart the truly Hellenic remark once made by the Grecian poetess Corinne to Pindar, that "seeds should be sown with the hand, not with the sack." Fortunately for him the main lack of his poetic endowment, the peculiar mingling of poverty and prodigality, was so popular in its nature that, in his country and at his time, it tended to smooth the path to fame rather than to obstruct it. V.