hip, and the acceptance
by the theatre of his juvenile play, "Valborg," had led to a somewhat
unusual result. He was given a free ticket of admission, and a few
weeks of theatre-going opened his eyes to the defects of his own
accepted work, which he withdrew before it had been inflicted upon the
public. The full consciousness of his poetical calling came to him
upon his return from a student gathering at the university town of
Upsala, whither he had gone as a special correspondent. "When I came
home from the journey," 'he says, "I slept three whole days with a few
brief intervals for eating and conversation. Then I wrote down my
impressions of the journey, but just because I had first lived and then
written, the account got style and color; it attracted attention, and
made me all the more certain that the hour had come. I packed up, went
home, thought it all over, wrote and rewrote `Between the Battles' in a
fortnight, and travelled to Copenhagen with the completed piece in my
trunk; I would be a poet." He then set to writing "Synnoeve Solbakken,"
published it in part as a newspaper serial, and then in book form, in
the autumn of 1857. He had "commenced author" in good earnest.

The next fifteen years of Bjoernson's life were richly productive.
Within a single year he had published "Arne," the second of his peasant
idyls and perhaps the most remarkable of them all, and had also
published two brief dramas, "Halte-Hulda" and the one already mentioned
as the achievement of fourteen feverish days. The remaining product of
the fifteen years includes two more prose idyls, "A Happy Boy" and "The
Fisher Maiden" (with a considerable number of small pieces similar in
character); three more plays drawn from the treasury of old Norse
history, "King Sverre," "Sigurd Slembe," and "Sigurd Jorsalfar"; a
dramatic setting of the story of "Mary Stuart in Scotland"; a little
social comedy, "The Newly Married Couple," which offers a foretaste of
his later exclusive preoccupation with modern life; "Arnljot Gelline,"
his only long poem, a wild narrative of the clash between heathendom
and the Christian faith in the days of Olaf the Holy; and, last but by
no means least, the collection of his "Poems and Songs." Thus at the
age of forty, Bjoernson found himself with a dozen books to his credit
books which had stirred his fellow countrymen as no other books had
ever stirred them, arousing them to the full consciousness of their own
nature