of remarkable personalities the country had lost in recent years: Bertel Thor-
valdsen, Hans Christian Ørsted, and Adam Oehlenschla ̈ger.
Moreover, the event echoed across most of the country, receiving much
attention in many of the small-town papers. The news soon spread to neigh-
boring countries, appearing in the columns of the SwedishAftonbladetas
early as November 16, and appearing in the NorwegianChristiania-Posten
the following week. Kierkegaard’s death—and the graveside protest by his
nephew, Henrik Lund—were material well-suited for ideological use by
various agitators: The newspaperMorgenpostendid not disguise its belief that
it was “every Christian’s duty to work to overturn the entire [ecclesiastical]
structure, including its privileged clergy, the sooner, the better.” Clever
versifiers seized the occasion to make a little money, peddling pieces with
titles like “Who Will Follow in Kierkegaard’s Footsteps?—A Word for His
Adherents to Consider” and the elegy “Søren Kierkegaard’s Final Hours.”
Supposedly, all profits from the sale of this latter poem would go to an
impoverished couple with seven small children, and the first of its twelve
stanzas went as follows:
Like a refugee, homeless,
Abandoned by all,
He ended his days,
Bereft of all cheer,
Absent love, absent hope,
At his predestined goal.
And, I surely believe,
With his cheeks wet with tears.This should provide an idea of the piece’s tone and its level of sophistication,
but nevertheless, in own peculiar way, the seventh stanza did manage to
communicate something quite true:
True, a martyr indeed
For the moment it took
For the jeers of the mob
To crush body and soul.
But the roar of the crowd
Its victim forsook
Even before
His body was cold.On November 15, Goldschmidt discussed the death inNorth and South,
writing in opposition to the view that it was the finger of God that had
stopped Kierkegaard in the midst of his attack on the church. “He was