Greinar (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.01.1943, Side 173

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death, being at the same time his own spiritual guide,
the child of God, fearless and confident, welcoming
death as a friend and liberator from the sorrows and
hardships of this world. We might possibly seek in
vain for parallels in the whole realm of literature.
Possibly there is not another poet-clergyman, who
equals Hallgrímur Pétursson at that moment, the destitute
Poet, leprous and decrepit in the turf-cottage at Ferstikla
by Hvalfjörður, composing the most sublime religious
hymns, consoling himself and others, soaring to the
heights in prayer to his last breath.
We now take our leave of Hallgrímur Pétursson,
the povertystricken poet-clergyman. But the nation has
Pot taken her leave of him. His contemporaries, it
is true, appreciated him as a poet, but did not realize
his true greatness, which was revealed only gradu-
ally. And it was the intelligent, book-loving common
people of Iceland, who first enthroned him. The great
and learned had to follow suit. The people demanded
ever new editions of the Passion-Hymns, or as one
°f the bishops from the latter part of the 17th
century put it in a preface to one of these editions:
“The people do not seem to get tired of them.”
Hallgrímur Pétursson’s poetical genius has long since
heen universally recognized. The greatest critics and
Poets, wether they are adherents of the church
0r not, or even its enemies, are all unanimous, that
°f the numerous galaxy of Icelandic poets none was
kreater than he, and that in the field of religious
Poetry, foreign and Icelandic, he is unsurpassed.
One of the greatest poets of our tirne, the Rev.
Matthías Jochumsson, who died in 1920, composed in
1874 on the 200th anniversary of the poet’s death,
a great commemorative poem. This poem concludes with
these true words:
The sons of Iceland will remember you
so long as sun doth shine on mountains blue.