[Illustration:  HJALMAR H. BOYESEN]

He came of well-to-do people, and received a liberal education at the gymnasium of Christiania, the University of Leipsic, and the University of Norway.  His father, professor of mathematics at the Naval Academy, had made several trips to the United States and had been impressed by the opportunities offered there to energetic young men.  Upon his urgent advice, Hjalmar when about twenty-one came to America, and soon obtained a position upon a Norwegian newspaper, the Fremad of Chicago.

From childhood he had longed to write, but had been discouraged by his father, who expatiated upon the limitations of their native tongue, and assured him that to succeed in literature he must be able to write in another language as readily as in his own.  Even in his school days he had shown a remarkable aptitude for languages; not only for understanding and speaking them, but for a sympathetic comprehension of foreign literatures, and that sensitiveness to shades of expression which so rarely comes to any but a native.  He now worked with all his energy to acquire English, not only as a necessary tool, but as the best medium for conveying his own thought.

This whole-souled devotion to an adopted tongue was soon rewarded by a more spontaneous ease of expression than he possessed even in his native Norwegian.  No one could guess from his poems that he was foreign to the speech in which he wrote them; few even among those born and bred to its use have had such mastery of its capacities.

He soon left the Fremad and began teaching Greek and Latin at the small Urbana University, in Ohio.  Thence he was called to Cornell University in 1874 as professor of German, and in 1880 to Columbia College, where later he became professor of German languages and literatures.  He was a teacher of rare stimulus and charm.  He had an attractive vigor of personality; his treatment of subjects was at once keenly analytic and very sympathetic, while his individual point of view was impressed in an easy and vivid style.

The same qualities won for Boyesen a distinguished place in the lecture-field, where he gave his audiences an exceptional combination of solid learning and graceful and lucid expression.  A series on the Norse sagas, at the Lowell Institute in Boston, are still valued as ‘Scandinavian Studies.’

In critical work, of which these studies form a part, Professor Boyesen made his chief mark, as was natural, on the literature and legends of his native land.  The best commentary on Ibsen yet published in English is his introduction to Ibsen’s works; he manages to compress within the space of a very few pages the pith of the great anarch’s social ideas and the character of his dramatic work.  His ‘Goethe and Schiller’ is also excellent.