In July 1808 he left Paris and spent the autumn and winter in Switzerland as the guest of Madame de Staël at Coppet, in the midst of her salon. In the spring of 1809, Oehlenschläger went to Rome to visit Bertel Thorvaldsen, and in his house wrote the tragedy of "Correggio." He hurriedly returned to Denmark in the spring of 1810, partly to take the chair of aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen, partly to marry the sister-in-law of Knud Lyne Rahbek, to whom he had been long betrothed. His first course of lectures dealt with his Danish predecessor Johannes Ewald, the second with Schiller. From this time forward his literary activity became very great; in 1811 he published the Oriental tale of "Ali og Gulhyndi", and in 1812 the last of his great tragedies, "Stærkodder".