HAUCH, TANS CARSTEN, one of the best Danish poets of the 19th c., was born at Frederikshald, in Norway, in 1791; graduated at the university of Christiania in 1821; and after having traveled through Germany, Italy, and France at the cost of the govern ment, with a view of prosecuting tire study of natural history, came to Copenhagen in 1827, and was appointed professor of physics at the royal academy of Soroe, in Denmark. This post Hanch exchanged in 1846 for the chair of northern literature in the university of Kiel, but on the breaking out of the Sleswick-ITolstein revolution, two years after wards, lie was compelled to return to Copenhagen, where the dowager-queen. Maria Sophia, offered him an asylum at the palace of Frederiksborg, where he resided for several years; and on the death of his friend Oehlenselffitger, in 1850, he succeeded him in the chair of restheties at the university of Copenhagen. Hanch's earliest attempts at dramatic composition— Co &aster e and Rosa ura —which appeared in 1816-17, attracted very little attention, but his tragedies of Tiberius og Bajazet, Gregory VII., and Don Juan (1829) at once established his reputation, which he fully maintained by his subserpient dramas of Karl den Feinten's Di;d (the death of Charles V.).1IastriehtR Belijring (the siege of Maestricht), firrnd (Irathe (1841), and JIarsk Stig (1850), in which he exhibits great powers of individualizing character, and portraying the local coloring of the scenes which he cicscribes. Many of his pieces were translated by liimsclf into German, and
were represented with success at the principal theaters of Germany and Sweden. Hunch's dramatic epic, Ilamodryaden, which belongs to the ultra romantic school, has met with less favor among his own countrymen than i11 Germany, where it elicited the commendatory notice of Tieck, Schubert, and other critics of note; but his Lyriskeliyte, 1842 (lyrical poems), some of which are extremely beautiful, enjoy nn undisputed p01)11_ laxity in Denmark. As a writer of tales and romances, hunch showed considerable diversity of talent; the principal are—)m Polsk Familie (a Polish family); Stottet ved Rhinen castle on the l hiqe); and Gvldnragern (the goldsmith, 1836-45); Saga em Thorwakl Vidfasle (1849); 2t'.'rdiscke Mytholoyie, Waldemar Seier (1862), etc. His Robert Fulton (1853) is regarded as the most perfect of his works. IIauch was a voluminous contributor to current Danish and German literature, and in his own country his name is associated with a sharp literary contest, in which lie took an active and not always a very dignified part against his countryman and brother poet, J. L. Heiberg. He died at Rome in 1872.