Tegnér himself draws a parallel between his work and such studies as Goethe's "Iphigenia" and Walter Scott's "The Lady of the Lake." The last parallel has more truth than the first, although Tegnér himself says, "the Scotch particularism in Scott, like the Judaical tone in the Old Testament, limits and suppresses what might otherwise have freer and higher flight." Tegnér finds himself in a literary-historic station, which is half-way between the two extremes, Walter Scott and Byron. Half a century of his life falls within the lifetime of Goethe, and he witnessed the whole of Byron's life. From Goethe, whom it was difficult for him to understand, he learned but little; he showed himself most susceptible to his influence when it approached him through Oehlenschläger; for the Byronic impression his temperament was more open, yet he held himself bravely above all contamination, and the effort to do so was facilitated in a higher degree by the romantic idealistic vaccine with which he had early been inoculated. As a poet he was too filled with his own _ego_ to comprehend the impersonal element in the creative powers of Goethe; on the other hand, his egotism was not sufficiently profound to enable him to follow Byron on his voyages of discovery within subjectivity. Like Scott and Oehlenschläger he is national, closely bound to his country, his people and its heroic past; but there is in his nature a tendency against distinctly marked personality: he approaches the Byronic type at a certain remoteness.