There is perhaps no labor that so completely excites all the vital forces, exhausts the nerves, refines and enervates the feelings, as that of literary production.  There has never been the slightest danger, however, that the exertions of Bjoernson’s poetic productiveness would affect his lungs as in the case of Schiller, or his spine as in the case of Heine; there has been no cause to fear that inimical articles in the public journals would ever give him his death-blow, as they did Halvdan, the hero of his drama ‘Redaktoeren’ (The Editor); or that he would yield, as so many modern poets have yielded, to the temptation of resorting to pernicious stimulants or to dissipation as antidotes for the overwrought or depleted state of the nervous system occasioned by creative activity.  Nothing has injured Bjoernson’s spine; his lungs are without blemish; a cough is unknown to him; and his shoulders were fashioned to bear without discomposure the rude thrusts which the world gives, and to return them.  He is perhaps the only important writer of our day of whom this may be said.  As an author he is never nervous, not when he displays his greatest delicacy, not even when he evinces his most marked sensibility.

Strong as the beast of prey whose name [Bjoern=Bear] occurs twice in his; muscular, without the slightest trace of corpulence, of athletic build, he looms up majestically in my mind, with his massive head, his firmly compressed lips, and his sharp, penetrating gaze from behind his spectacles.  It would be impossible for literary hostilities to overthrow this man, and for him there never existed that greatest danger to authors (a danger which for a long time menaced his great rival Henrik Ibsen), namely, that of having his name shrouded in silence.  Even as a very young author, as a theatrical critic and political writer, he had entered the field of literature with such an eagerness for combat that a rumbling noise arose about him wherever he appeared.  Like his own Thorbjoern in ‘Synnoeve Solbakken,’ he displayed in early youth the combative tendency of the athlete; but like his Sigurd in ’Sigurd Slembe,’ he fought not merely to practice his strength, but from genuine though often mistaken love of truth and justice.  At all events, he understood thoroughly who to attract attention.

An author may possess great and rare gifts, and yet, through lack of harmony between his own personal endowments and the national characteristics or the degree of development of his people, may long be prevented from attaining a brilliant success.  Many of the world’s greatest minds have suffered from this cause.  Many, like Byron, Heine, and Henrik Ibsen, have left their native land; many more who have remained at home have felt forsaken by their compatriots.  With Bjoernson the case is quite different.  He has never, it is true, been peacefully recognized by the entire Norwegian people; at first, because the form he used was too new and unfamiliar; later, because