There is also, in my experience, a great difference in our national character, which depends upon whether the crossing has taken place with the weak Laplander, or with the well-grown, strong, bold Fin.  It makes a difference in temperament, as great as between minor and major in the same piece of music.  That touch of rich colour in our nation, of which the poet Wergeland’s endless wealth of imagery and flight beyond logic are a representation, is certainly Finnish—­at any rate, there is very little of it in our old Sagas.  And it can be understood from this, what grandeur of nature the Fin has added to the Norwegian character.  The Fin admixture has been a great and essential factor in the composition of the mental qualities of our people at the present day.

I have often talked with people about this Finnish admixture, which, in a near degree, is looked upon almost as a disgrace, and I have found a surprisingly large number who were secretly of my opinion.  Finnish admixture makes energetic, logical, bold, enterprising men; it has, to a great extent, given a backbone to the character of our Eastland and Trondhjem people.  In Nordland, on the contrary, the Lap element is predominant, and has in a measure altered the character of the people.  The Fin-Norwegian is master of Nordland nature; the Lap-Norwegian is subject to it, and suffers under its oppression.

Nature’s contrasts in Nordland are too great and extreme for the mind of the race that lives there not to be exceedingly liable to receive permanent injury from them.  The extreme melancholy and sadness which is found there in the poor man, and which so often results in mental derangement and suicide, has most undoubtedly its connection with and reason in these natural conditions; in the long winter darkness with its oppressive, overwhelming scenes that crush down the mind in light-forsaken loneliness; and in the strong and sudden impressions that, in the dark season as well as in the light, affect all too violently the delicate inner fibres of being.  I have thought over these things as perhaps no one else has done—­thought, while I myself have been suffering under them; and I understand—­although again, when it is a question of my own person, I do not understand it in the least—­why “second sight,” fremsynethed as it is called in Nordland, can there, just as in the Shetland and Orkney Isles, make its appearance, and be inherited in a family.  I understand that it is a disease of the mind, which no treatment, no intelligence or reflection can cure.  A visionary is born with an additional sense of sight.  Beside his two sound eyes, he has the power of looking into a world that others have only a suspicion of, and when the occasion comes it is his doom to be obliged to use his extraordinary power; it will not be stopped with books or by intelligent reflection; it will not be suppressed even here in the “enlightened capital”:  it can at the most only be darkened for a while with the curtain of forgetfulness.