ing the tedious school-days, his
beautiful Romsdal valley lay waiting for him, beckoning him home at
every vacation--always alluring and radiant, with an idyllic shimmer."

Hence, no doubt, his sunny poetic vision which unconsciously idealizes.
Just as in daily intercourse he displays a positive genius for drawing
out what is good in a man, and brushes away as of small account what
does not accord with his own conception of him, nay, in a measure,
forces him to be as he believes him to be, so every character in these
early tales seems to bask in the genial glow of his optimism. The farm
Solbakken (Sunny Hill) lies on a high elevation, where the sun shines
from its rise to its setting, and both Synnoeve and her parents walk
about in this still and warm illumination. They are all good, estimable
people, and their gentle piety, without any tinge of fanaticism, invests
them with a quiet dignity. The sterner and hardier folk at Granliden
(Pine Glen) have a rugged honesty and straightforwardness which, in
connection with their pithy and laconic speech, makes them less genial,
but no less typically Norse. They have a distinct atmosphere and spinal
columns that keep them erect, organic, and significant. Even
reprehensible characters like Aslak and Nils Tailor (in "Arne") have a
certain claim upon our sympathy, the former as a helpless victim of
circumstance, the latter as a suppressed and perverted genius.

In the spring of 1860 Bjoernson went abroad and devoted three years to
foreign travel, spending the greater part of his time in Italy. From
Rome he sent home the historical drama "King Sverre" (1861), which is
one of his weakest productions. It is written in blank verse, with
occasional rhymes in the more impressive passages. Of dramatic interest
in the ordinary sense, there is but little. It is a series of more or
less animated scenes, from the period of the great civil war
(1130-1240), connected by the personality of Sverre. Under the mask,
however, of mediaeval history, the author preaches a political sermon to
his own contemporaries. Sverre, as the champion of the common people
against the tribal aristocracy, and the wily Bishop Nicholas as the
representative of the latter become, as it were, permanent forces, which
have continued their battle to the present day. There can be no doubt
that Bjoernson, whose sympathies are strongly democratic, permitted the
debate between the two to become needlessly didactic, and strained