ed 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.

Ah! when I think how, at home in Nordland, I pictured to myself the
king's palace in Kristiania, with pinnacles and towers standing out
grandly over the town, and the king's men like a golden stream from the
castle court right up to the thr