In pure letters, his earliest poems collected into ‘Idyls of Norway,’ and his early stories of Norse life, of which ‘Gunnar’ was first and best, were never surpassed by him in later life, if indeed they were equaled.  The best powers of his mind were gradually drawn into fields which solidified and broadened his intellect, but checked the free inspiration and romantic feeling of youth.  In gauging his merit as a creative artist, we must set aside all but the work of these few enthusiastic years.  An important part of this change must be credited to the influence of the Russian novelists and their American disciples.  Whatever may be the final verdict on Turgenieff and Tolstoy, their tremendous effect on American literature is one of the most striking facts in our recent literary history; its value is a more dubious matter, according to the point of view.  Boyesen met Turgenieff in Paris, and was deeply impressed by him; he also became intimate with W.D.  Howells, and through the influence of the latter became an ardent disciple of Tolstoy.  The result was to transform the romanticist of ’Gunnar’—­steeped in the legends of old Norway, creating a fairy-land atmosphere about him and delighting to live in the ideal,—­into a so-called realist, setting himself to the task of brushing away all illusions and painting life as sterile and unpicturesque as it is in its meanest, most commonplace conditions.  To do this, he claimed, was the stern function of the author.  To help his readers to self-knowledge, although it might lessen their happiness, was the greatest service he could render them.

He succeeded.  The best comment on the theory and the practice alike is that ‘Gunnar’ lives and its realistic successors do not, and indeed never did; and that much the same may be said of the corresponding epochs of other American novelists’ work, with a few exceptions where native genius was too strong to be spoiled even by a vicious artistic principle.  ‘The Mammon of Unrighteousness’ and ‘The Golden Calf’ belong to the second half of Boyesen’s work.

A high place must be given, however, to his stories for boys in the children’s magazines, principally on Norwegian themes.  These are among the best of their kind,—­spirited, wholesome, strong in plot and workmanship, and containing some examples of his most perfect style.  Even the more slender juvenile tales have passages of the finest poetic spirit, and a charm scarcely equaled in his more ambitious work.  He won some laurels as a dramatist:  ‘Alpine Roses’ was successfully acted in New York in 1883, and ‘Ilka on the Hilltop’ (taken from his story of that name) in 1884.

Although he was in complete sympathy with the American life and character and wished to make them his own, Professor Boyesen was never quite an American.  His descriptions of life in the United States are therefore always the result of a foreigner’s observation.  His generous humanity appeals to all races, however, and his books have been successfully translated into German, Russian, and Norwegian.  For years he had been collecting matter for an extensive history of Scandinavian literature,—­a task for which his nationality, his scholarship, and his mastery of the English language especially fitted him.  His sudden death at forty-seven prevented its accomplishment, and perhaps deprived him of a still wider and solider fame.