KIERKEGAARD, Sören (1813-1855), the greatest philosophical writer that Scandinavia has produced, was born at Copenhagen, May 5, 1813, and was the seventh child of a respectable Jutland hosier. He was a very serious and precocious boy, weak in health, morbid iu character. Of his mother, singularly enough, he has slid no word in his copious autobiographical remains, although he was in his twenty-second year when she died; she had been his father’s servant Kierkegaard became a student at the university of Copenhagen, and took up theology as a profession, but never became a priest. He lived in great retirement, deeply oppressed with melancholy and physical suffering, and was at first very little known to his contemporaries. In 1838 he published his first volume, Papers of a Still Living Man, a very poor attempt to characterize Hans Andersen. Two years later he took his degree, with a treatise On Irony, which contains the germs of his later speculations. In 1840 he engaged himself to a young lady, and shortly, after broke off the engagement, an extraordinary step for which he has given many extraordinary reasons. It was not until 1842 that he began the composition of his greatest work, Enten —Eller (“Either—Or ”), on which his reputation mainly rests; this appeared in 1843, and was immediately followed by a rapid succession of philosophical works, which formed at once an epoch in the history of Danish literature. From 1849 to 1854, however, he was silent as an author. In the last-mentioned year he published a polemical tract against Bishop Martensen, and the short remainder of his life was spent in a feverish agitation against the theology and practice of the state church. But his health, which had always been miserable, was growing worse and worse. In October ...