After five years as lecturer in the University he was, in 1840, made
professor of law, political economy, and statistics. Regarded as the
most representative Norwegian of his age and its aspirations, he was
called by his countrymen "Norway's best son." Though interested in the reform of education and the introduction of European culture,
and hence favorable to Danish literature, standing with Welhaven and
against Wergeland, it was in economics that his influence was
greatest, and indeed greater than that of any other one man in all
Scandinavia. He was the soul of the organizing labor that
accompanied and conditioned Norway's surprisingly rapid material
advance in the decades before and after the middle of the nineteenth
century. A friend of Scandinavism, in politics a liberal
conservative, but never a party man, he was member of the Storting
for Christiania from 1842 to 1869. Schweigaard's personality
contributed most to the high esteem in which he was universally
held; his character was open and direct, actively unselfish, loftily
ideal. His wife died on January 28, 1870. On a walk the next day he
suddenly was seized with intense pains, had to go home and to bed,
and died on February 1. An autopsy showed that his heart had
ruptured. Their joint funeral was held on February 5.
Note 48.
TO AASMUND OLAFSEN VINJE. Vinje, the son of a poor cottager, was
born on a farm in Telemarken, April 6, 1818, and died July 30, 1870.
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