“When I write in Danish,” says Oehlenschlaeger, “I write for only six hundred persons.”  And so, in view of this somewhat exaggerated statement, he himself translated his best works into the more favored and more widely spread Germanic idiom.  It requires a certain amount of courage in an author to write in his own native tongue only, when he knows that he thereby limits the number of his readers.  We see in our own days, among the Sclavonic races, men whose writings breathe the most ardent patriotism, whose labors and researches are all concentrated within the sphere of their nationality, publishing, not in their own Polish, Czechish, or Serbian, but in German or French.

The history of language shows us a two-fold tendency,—­one of divergence from some common stem, followed by one of concentration, of unity, in the literature.  Thus, in France, the Langue d’Oil superseded the richer and more melodious Provencal; in Spain the Castilian predominated; while for several centuries it has been the steady tendency of the High-German to become the language of letters and of the upper classes among the various Teutonic races.  Since the Bible-translation of Luther, this central dialect has not only become the medium in which poet and philosopher, historian and critic address the nation, but it may be said to have entirely superseded the Northern and Southern forms.  Whatever local or linguistic interest may be manifested for the works of Groth in the Ditmarsch Platt-Deutsch, or for the sweet Alemannic songs of Hebel, the centralizing tongue is that in which Schiller and Goethe wrote.

The allied Danish and Dutch have escaped this ingulfing process.  The former, instead of retreating, seeks in the present to enlarge its circuit; and great are the complaints in Schleswig-Holstein of the arbitrary and despotic imposition of Danish on a State of the German Confederation.  The present government of Holland has not remained inactive.  Much has been done to encourage men of letters and counteract the Gallic influences which prevailed in the early part of the century.

But the Flemings speaking nearly the same language as their Protestant neighbors, where is their literature now?  The language itself, in which are handed down to us some of the masterpieces of the Middle Ages, as “Reynard the Fox” and “Gudrun,” is disregarded, even discountenanced, by Government.  It is with a feeling of sadness that we read the annals of a literature which met so many obstacles to its progress.  Despised by foreign rulers, thrust back by the Spanish policy of the Duke of Alva, its authors exiled and seeking refuge in other lands, its very existence has been a constant battling against the inroads of more powerful neighbors.