While Tegnér was still occupied in putting the last touches to his "Fridthjof," the furies that had been lurking on his threshold shook their snaky locks before his eyes and stretched forth their long, lank arms to embrace him. They were the furies of disease, of passion, of life-weariness, and of dawning insanity, and they joined hands and danced round him in a circle. The year 1825, the same in which "Fridthjof" appeared and proclaimed his fame to every quarter of the globe, was the year that marked the great crisis of his life. Physical as well as mental was the crisis. It has, to be sure, a purely bodily side; yet apart from the fact that this must be obscure even to a physician, it is only the mental and emotional side that the critic can study, and in it seems undoubtedly to have been the prime cause of the disorder. The mental and emotional catastrophe, however, is almost as obscure as the physical. It has hitherto remained unnoticed, chiefly because the editions of Tegnér's poems have been made, _in usum delphini,_ by his surviving relatives. Their division into periods is thoroughly confusing; the poems are sparingly dated; indeed, as I have discovered, most of the love poems are pre-dated twenty-five years, in order to make the reader believe they were intended for Tegnér's wife when she was his betrothed bride. "The Ode to Melancholy" (Mjeltsjukan), the poem of which a strophe and a half have just been given, is inserted in the last edition, not dated between a poem of 1812 and another one of 1813. Tegnér's letters prove that it dates from 1825. This year begins for Tegnér with violent illness; even on New Year's day of the year he is so ill that he believes death to be nigh at hand. In March he writes that his mind becomes every day more and more clouded. "God preserve me from melancholy and misanthropy," he says. In July he writes: "Blindness seems to me one of the most horrible of earthly misfortunes--next to one which I myself have experienced." Everything that formerly gave him pleasure is now distasteful to him. His disease continues as an inner restlessness, yet without any actual bodily pain. "My fancy, which was very excitable at the outset, is now like a whirlpool, that casts into swift rotation and soon destroys everything it can draw into its vortex."