ade an exhaustive report to the proper department, detailing
with touching minuteness the results of his observations. The Norwegian
government has always taken a strong (and usually very intelligent)
interest in rising artists, musicians, and men of letters, and has
endeavored by stipends and salaries to compensate them for the smallness
of the public which the country affords. Jonas Lie was now a
sufficiently conspicuous man to come into consideration in the
distribution of the official _panem et circenses_. The state awarded
him a largess of $400 for one year (twice renewed), in order to enable
him to go to Italy and "educate himself for a poet;" and he was also
made a beneficiary of the well-known Schafer legacy for the training of
artists. In the autumn of 1871 he started with his wife and four
children for Rome. It was in a solemnly festal frame of mind that he now
resolved to devote the rest of his life to his real vocation, which at
last he had found. This was what they had all meant--his gropings,
trials, and failures. They had all fitted him for the life-work which
was now to be his. The world lay before him as in the shining calm after
storm.

He took his artistic training, as everything else, with extreme
seriousness. With the utmost conscientiousness he started out with his
Thomasine, morning after morning, to study the Vatican and the
Capitoline collections. "Happy is the man," says Goethe, "who learns
early in life what art means." But Jonas Lie was thirty-eight years old;
and, as far as I can judge from his writings, I should venture to say
that the secret of classical art has never been unlocked to him. It lies
probably rather remote from the sphere of his sensations. His genius is
so profoundly Germanic that only an ill-wisher would covet for him that
expansion of vision which would enable him to perceive with any degree
of artistic realization and intimacy the glorious serenity of the Juno
Ludovisi and the divine distinction of the Apollo Belvedere.

The two books which were the first-fruits of the Roman sojourn were a
disappointment to his friends, though in the case of the unpretentious
collection called "Tales and Sketches from Nordland" (1872) there is no
reason why it should have been. The public found that it was not on a
level with "The Visionary," and by "The Visionary" Jonas Lie was bound
to be judged, whether he liked it or not. That is the penalty of having
produced a masterpiece, that one