ng
himself in nocturnal attire before reposing, when Jonas Lie's well-aimed
missile hit him in the stomach and doubled him up with pain.

A skeleton in the den of a medical friend caused Lie many a shiver, for
he could never quite rid himself of the idea that it moved. All that lay
beyond the range of the senses drew him with an irresistible,
half-shuddering attraction; and he resented all attempts to explain it
by ordinary mundane laws. As his first novel abundantly proves, he
possesses in a marked degree the "sixth sense" that gropes eagerly and
with a half-terrified fascination in the dusk that lies beyond the
daylight of the other five.

The verses which Jonas Lie began about this time to produce are mostly
written for patriotic and other festive occasions, and therefore arouse
no creepy sensations. But they are so overladen with confusing imagery
that they have to be read twice to be understood. In the poem "Solveig"
(1855) he makes the heart "in its prison envy the free-born thoughts
which fly to the beloved one's breast." His versification is gnarled
and twisted, and a perpetual strain upon the ear. As Mr. Nordahl Rolfsen
has remarked, one need not be a princess in order to be troubled by the
peas in his verse.[13] Browning himself could scarcely have perpetrated
more unmelodious lines than Jonas Lie is capable of. Nevertheless there
is often in his patriotic songs a most inspiriting bugle-note, which is
found nowhere in Browning, unless it be in the "Cavalier Tunes." The
curiosities of his prosody are (according to his biographer)
attributable to the Nordland accent in his speech. They would sound all
right, he says, to a Nordland ear.

[13] Nordahl Rolfsen: Norske Digtere, p. 527.

At the risk of violating chronology I may as well speak here of his two
collections of "Poems" (1867 and 1889) (the latter being an expurgated
but enlarged edition of the earlier), to which the present criticisms
particularly apply. Both editions contain notable things amid occasional
bits of what scarcely rises above doggerel. The sailor songs, though
rough, are true in tone and have a catching nautical swing; but of far
deeper ring and more intensely felt are the poems which deal with the
nocturnal sides of nature. These have at times a strange, shivering
resonance, like an old violin whose notes ripple down your spine. I
refer especially to such untranslatable poems as "Draugen," "Finn-Shot,"
"The Mermaid," and "Nightmare.