but gifted with the most wonderful imagination and power, K.J.L.
Almquist. His life was as checquered as his writings were various. In
turn a clergyman, a schoolmaster, a journalist, and an exile, he has
written volumes on almost every conceivable subject, from fiction,
poetry, and history, to lexicography, pedagogy, and mathematics. His
stories, published in two series, under the common title of _The
Book of the Hedgerose_, show powers of conception, imagination, and
description such as are only to be found in Edgar Allen Poe. His was
an essentially revolutionary temperament. He disdained all authority,
and cavilled at all moral restraints. He was in constant rebellion
against society, its accepted laws and precepts, and vented his moral
skepticism in bitter sarcasm and cutting paradoxes. "But two things
are white in this world," he would say, "innocence and arsenic." The
coupling of the two, however, nearly proved fatal to him. He was
involved in a mysterious affair of poisoning, in which the victim was
a dunning creditor. He was suspected of having given him arsenic by
way of ridding himself of the debt which he could not pay. No proof
of the fact could be adduced, and the crime was never brought home to
him; but public opinion was against him, and fearing or distrusting
the justice of his country, he fled from it ere the case was tried. He
wandered over Europe and America, trying his hand at everything, and
died, a literary wreck, in Germany, longing, and yet not daring, to
return to his country. Lately, the Society of Authors in Stockholm,
judging that his crime was "not proven," while his literary merits
were great beyond all doubt, undertook the rehabilitation of his
memory. His remains were brought back from Lubeck, and buried in
Stockholm with "literary" honors, among others a remarkable oration
delivered at his grave by Verner von Heidenstam, in which he was
styled a martyr in the great cause of the emancipation of thought.
Whatever may be thought of his moral character, Almquist was a great