BAGGESEN, JENS IMMANUEL Danish poet, was born at Korsor. His parents were very poor, and before he was 12 he was sent to copy documents at the office of the clerk of the district. He was a melancholy, feeble child, and before this he had attempted suicide more than once. By dint of indomitable perseverance he found his way in 1782 to the University of Copenhagen. His Comical Tales (1792) in verse took the town by storm, and the struggling young poet found himself a popular favourite at twenty-one. He left Denmark in pique at the failure of his opera, Holge Danske (1789), and spent the next years in Germany, France and Switzerland, returning for a short period in 179o, when he published his fine descriptive poem, the Laby rinth. The next 20 years were spent in incessant restless wander ings over the north of Europe, Paris latterly becoming his nominal home. He continued to publish volumes alternately in Danish and German. Of the latter the most important was the idyllic epos in hexameters called Particenais (1803) . In 1806 he returned to Copenhagen to find the young Ohlenschlager installed as the popular poet of the day. Until 182o he resided in Copenhagen, engaged in constant literary feuds. He then left Denmark for the last time and went back to his beloved Paris, where he lost his second wife and youngest child in 1822, and after the miseries of an imprisonment for debt fell at last into a state of hopeless melancholy madness. He died Oct. 3, 1826, in the hospital at Hamburg on his way back to Denmark. Danish literature owes Baggesen a great debt for the firmness, polish and form which he introduced into it—his style being always finished and elegant. With all his faults he stands as the greatest figure between Holberg and Ohlenschlager. Of all his poems, however, the loveliest and best, is a little simple song, "There was a time when I was very little," which every Dane, high or low, knows by heart, and which is matchless in its simplicity and pathos.