"To that far heaven my love belongeth, More than this earth,--receive it then; In heav'n 'twas nurtured, and it longeth To reach its starry home again."[17] Strange words from the lips of a poet who, moreover, was never weary of pursuing Platonic love with mockery, and with pretty sharp mockery too. His own was a fiery, passionate temperament. Notwithstanding his marriage, his years, and his office, he was an ardent and, as rumor declared, frequently a successful adorer of the fair sex. His conversational tone with ladies was often so loose as to scandalize people; and in letters, aphorisms, and poems published after his death, he made no concealment of his realistic conception of love. He does not even pay homage to the spiritualistic presentation of the relation of the sexes in poetry. He writes, for instance:-- "_Aeneadum genitrix, hominum divumque voluptas_ is not only poetized by the ancients, but deified as well. Our sentimental, nervous contemplation of love is by no means the only one, still less the most vigorous. How pale and weak, even from a purely poetic point of view, are most of the modern erotics with their water-colored tintings when compared to the eternal fresco paintings of the ancients!" And yet I should hesitate to believe that Tegnér would allow himself to be guided in this point exclusively by conventional motives. He was educated in far too idealistic doctrines ever to draw, with full consciousness, from a model, nor has he had a defined model for Ingeborg, as can plainly be detected in the poem itself, which on that account lost in individual realistic life what it gained in typical grandeur. Yet wholly without a model no artist can paint, and entirely without remodelling the dispositions and impressions of real life no poet can compose, least of all so subjective a poet as Tegnér. In the beginning of the poem he was inspired by the memories of his intercourse with his betrothed bride on the country estate of her parents; the idyllic element of Fridthjofs love undoubtedly arises from these memories, but not its dreamily enthusiastic pathos. Numerous indications point to the fact that Tegnér, who, like most poets, was always half in love, was thoroughly enamored during the years when he was writing his "Fridthjofs Saga." At the time when the canto in which Fridthjofs love attains its highest lyric expression was written (1824), Tegnér's affections may perchance have still been in a state of ecstatic, half-unconscious frenzy, now intersected with budding desire, now with that languishing for death, which sometimes accompanies even prosperous love, when an excess of passionate yearning, filling and torturing the soul, calls forth the wish that the heart might break:-- "How bless'd were he already yonder! How bless'd who now with thee could die,-- And, conqu'ring, 'mong the gods could wander, Embracing his pale maid on high."[18]