This is exactly the Byronic note, which would be still more audible, if I had preserved the rhymed couplets. Even Medora's male attire is borrowed by Maria, and much more of this Byronic melodramatic heroism is there, only a little more conventionally draped and with larger concessions to the Philistine sense of propriety. But even if Tegner in "Axel" had coquetted with the Romantic muse, it would be rash to conclude that he contemplated any durable relation. The note which he had struck in his renowned oration at the festival commemorating the Reformation (1817), came from the depth of his heart, and continued to resound through his speech and song for many years to come. I do not moan to imply, of course, that the Byronic Romanticism was very closely akin to that of Tieck, the Schlegels, and Novalis; or that Tegner in the least compromised his frank and manly liberalism by composing a variation, as it were, on a Byronic theme. How deeply he hated the mediaeval obscurantism which then, under the auspices of Metternich and his unholy "Holy Alliance" was spreading over Europe, he showed in numerous private and public utterances concerning the political condition of Europe after the fall of Napoleon. His greeting to the "New Year, 1816" (which his son-in-law has foolishly excluded from his edition of the collected works), is overbrimming with bitterness at the triumph of the enemies of the light. "Hurrah! Religion is a Jesuit, The rights of man are Jacobins; The world is free; the raven is white; Long live the Pope--and that other; I am going to Germany, and there I'll learn Sonnets to sing and incense to burn. "Welcome, thou New Year, with murder and gloom, Stupidity, lies, and fraud! I hope thou'lt make an end of our earth, A bullet at least she's worth; She's restless, poor thing, like many another, A shot through the head--she'll cause no more bother!" It was the fashion in those days to revile the Revolution, because it had produced the man on horseback who had turned the old order of things topsy-turvy in a very unceremonious fashion. Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth in England, and Klopstock, Schiller, and a horde of lesser lights in Germany, had hailed the French uprising as the bloody dawn of a new and more glorious day; but the excesses of the Reign of Terror frightened them back into the old fastnesses of Conservatism. Tegner (and to his honor be it said) was one of the few who did not despair of liberty because a people born and bred in despotism failed to exercise the wisdom and self-restraint which only liberty can foster. For the only road to the attainment of liberty is its practice and its abuse, and the slow education which can be acquired by no theoretical teaching, but only in the hard and expensive school of experience. For the terrible birth-pangs of liberty no despotically governed people can escape, unless it chooses to remain in thraldom.