The Soul in Nature

THE LIFE OF H. C. OERSTED.

the two brothers. He was several years their junior and formed a most distinct contrast in character through his eager excitability and the exulting pride of youth. This friendship of the youthful trio was maintained with undiminished intensity and freshness until the very end, when the two brothers—who from early youth had most intimately and actively participated in the brilliant development of the celebrated poet—accompanied him to his final resting place. But it was the youthful days of those three young men that presented an amount of talent, mutual emulation, and a shared, forward-striving ambition rarely met with in history.

It is well known, and may be considered a favorable circumstance, that the period of their youth occurred during the greatest mental fermentation ever exhibited in modern times. A new era of politics commenced in France, and one of philosophy and poetry in Germany; mental life was everywhere in action. Steffens returned to Denmark from Germany with a complete series of intellectual lectures and stood forth as the proclaimer of the new philosophical and poetic Gospels. The minds of the three young Danes matured rapidly and powerfully under this universal European spring sun.

Hans Christian Oersted, ex-officio Latin: "by virtue of his office" a physician, but by inclination a natural philosopher, became attached to the new aesthetic tendency that especially prevailed in the north. In 1797, he won the University prize (a gold medal) by replying to the aesthetic prize question: "On the limits of Poetry and Prose." About the same time, he passed his pharmaceutical examination, and in the following year, he gained another prize for a medical essay. In 1799, he wrote a dissertation for his doctoral degree on "The Architectonics of Natural Metaphysics," proving not only that he had investigated the actual matter of his own particular sciences—physics and chemistry—with clearness and originality, but that he had