In attempting to classify Bjoernson’s writings for the purpose of rendering some critical account of the man’s work, the first impulse is to group them into the three divisions of fiction, lyric, and drama.  But the most obvious fact of his long literary life is after all not so much that he has done great work in all three of these fundamental forms, as that the whole spirit and method of his work, whatever the form, underwent a radical transformation about midway in his career.  For the first twenty years of his active life, roughly speaking, he was an artist pure and simple; during the subsequent twenty years, also roughly speaking, he has been didactic, controversial, and tendentious. (The last word is good Spanish and German and ought to be good English.) For the purpose of the following summary analysis, I have therefore thought it best to make the fundamental grouping chronological rather than formal, since the plays and the novels of the first period have much more in common with one another than either the plays or the novels of the first period have in common with the plays or the novels of the second.

Bjoernson’s work in lyrical and other non-dramatic poetry belongs almost wholly to the first period.  It consists mainly of short pieces scattered through the idyllic tales and saga-plays that nearly make up the sum of his activity in its purely creative and poetic phase.  Some of these lyrics strike the very highest and purest note of song, and have secured lasting lodgment on the lips of the people.  One of them, indeed, has become pre-eminently the national song of Norway, and may be heard wherever Norsemen are gathered together upon festal occasions.  It begins in this fashion:—­

     “Ay, we love this land of ours,
       Crowned with mountain domes;
     Storm-scarred o’er the sea it towers
       With a thousand homes. 
     Love it, as with love unsated
       Those who gave us birth,
     While the saga-night, dream-weighted,
       Broods upon our earth.”

Another patriotic song, hardly less popular, opens with the following stanza:—­

     “There’s a land where the snow is eternally king,
     To whose valleys alone come-the joys of the spring,
     Where the sea beats a shore rich, with lore of the past,
     But this land to its children is dear to the last.”

The fresh beauty of such songs as these is, however, almost utterly uncommunicable in another language.  Somewhat more amenable to the translator is the song ‘Over de Hoeje Fjelde’ (Over the Lofty Mountains), which occurs in ‘Arne,’ and which is perhaps the best of Bjoernson’s lyrics.  An attempt at a version of this poem will be found among the illustrative examples appended to the present essay.  The scattered verses of Bjoernson were collected into a volume of ‘Digte og Sange’ (Poems and Songs) in 1870, and in the same year was published ’Arnljot Gelline,’ the author’s