ods, I should call them the periods
of (1) Simplicity, (2) Confusion, (3) Dire Confusion.

I speak, of course, as a foreigner, obliged to read Bjoernson in
translations. But perhaps the disability is not so important as it
seems at first sight. Translations cannot hide Bjoernson's genius; nor
obscure the truth that his genius is essentially idyllic. Now if one
form of literary expression suffers more than another by translation
it is the idyll. Its bloom is peculiarly delicate; its freshness
peculiarly quick to disappear under much handling of any kind. But all
the translations leave _Arne_ a masterpiece, and _Synnoeve_ and _The
Happy Boy_.

How many artists have been twisted from their natural bent by the long
vogue of "naturalism" we shall never know. We must make the best of
the great works which have been produced under its influence, and be
content with that. But we may say with some confidence that Bjoernson's
genius was unfortunate in the date of its maturity. He was born on the
8th of December, 1832, in a lonely farmhouse among the mountains, at
the head of the long valley called Osterdalen; his father being priest
of Kvikne parish, one of the most savage in all Norway. After six
years the family removed to Naesset, in the Romsdal, "a spot as
enchanting and as genial as Kvikne is the reverse." Mr. Gosse, who
prefaces Mr. Heinemann's new series with a study of Bjoernson's
writings, quotes a curious passage in which Bjoernson records the
impression of physical beauty made upon his childish mind by the
physical beauty of Naesset:--

"Here in the parsonage of Naesset--one of the loveliest places in
Norway, where the land lies broadly spreading where two fjords
meet, with the green braeside above it, with waterfalls and
farmhouses on the opposite shore, with billowy meadows and cattle
away towards the foot of the valley, and, far overhead, along the
line of the fjord, mountains shooting promontory after promontory
out into the lake, a big farmhouse at the extremity of each--here
in the parsonage of Naesset, where I would stand at the close of
the day and gaze at the sunlight playing over mountain and
fjord, until I wept, as though I had done something wrong; and
where I, descending on my snow-shoes into some valley, would
pause as though bewitched by a loveliness, by a longing, which I
had not the power to explain, but which was so great that above