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a more ample expression and greater audacity of thought than in the one before it. Hærmændene paa Helgeland (The Warriors at Helgeland') followed in 1858, with a fresh series of scenes from old Norse history, given with wonderful vigor and precision. This again was written in prose; it seems as though Ibsen were determined to learn the art of subjugating the language to his will before he would launch out again on the perilous ocean of verse. It was this drama that made his fame; all just and discerning critics perceived that Hærmændene was the first truly national play that Norway had produced, and though some of the reviews resolutely ignored him, the people acknowledged him, and from this time forth he easily won his way. After a silence of four years he came forward again with Kjerlighedens Komedie (The Comedy of Love'), a piece in quite a new style-satirical, humorous, and lyrical-written in rhymed verse, a brilliant lampoon on the conventional ideas upon love and marriage. This increased his reputation still more, and introduced him to the public of Denmark and Sweden. He wrote now with perfect ease and courage, and the language began to show a flexibility and scope in his hands, which it had never shown before. All these years Ibsen was publishing from time to time small lyrical poems in the newspapers of the day, and winning much praise for these, though it must be confessed his occasional lyrics do not show that originality and brilliance that flash from his dramas. In 1864 another tragedy from the Middle Ages appeared from this eminent writer-KongsEmnerne (The Pretenders'), which was translated into German, and had great success. The same year he went to Rome, and, while living there under the influence of all that was exquisite and inspiring, he evolved a dramatic satire of such wonderful power and beauty that all his previous writings were thrown into the shade by it. This work, which lashes the religious coldness of the Norway of our own day, is named from its hero, Brand, and appeared in 1866. It was at once recognised all over Scandinavia and in Germany as being a masterpiece in a most difficult school of art. It is written in octosyllabic rhyming verse, broken by songs. As an example of Ibsen's lighter vein, and to break the monotony of my own remarks, I will give one of these:

Ille.

Agnes, my exquisite butterfly,

I will catch you sporting and winging; I am weaving a net with meshes small, And the meshes are my singing.

Hæc.

If I am a butterfly, tender and small,

From the heather-bells do not snatch me; But if you are a boy, and are fond of a game, You may hunt, though you must not catch me! Ille.

Agnes, my exquisite butterfly,

The meshes are all spun ready;

It will help you nothing to flutter and flap;
You are caught in the net already.
Hæc.

That I am a butterfly, bright and young.
A swinging butterfly, say you?
Then, ah! if you catch me under your net,
Don't crush my wings, I pray you!

Ille.

No! I will daintily lift you up,

And shut you into my breast;
There you may shelter the whole of your life,
Or play as you love best.

Two years later appeared Peer Gynt, a poem on the same principle as Brand, but even wilder and more audacious. The scene is professedly laid in Norway; but we find ourselves carried to the coast of Morocco, galloped through the Great Sahara, and landed in Egypt, with the statue of Memnon as one of the dramatis persona. Peer Gynt is a sharp satire on the social ethics of the day; and though it had a brilliant success, there were many who felt extreme indignation at the poet's tone. But a patriot of the truest sort does not always think it wise to touch abuses with kid gloves on, and a little wholesome ridicule is an excellent cure for some social disorders. The controversy that issued on the publication of this poem has been likened to the storm roused of old by Norges Damring. In 1870 a comedy in prose-De Unges Forbund (The Young Men's League') - came from the fertile pen, and was published at Copenhagen, while the author was visiting Egypt, to verify, perhaps, the scenes in Peer Gynt. Last year he collected the miscellaneous short poems of the last fifteen years into a little volume, which he sent home from Saxony. He has been a wanderer all his days.

The name and fame of Björnsterne Björnsen have spread farther over the world's

surface than that of any of his countrymen. Though he is still young the youngest of all the Norwegian poets-his works are admired and eagerly read all over the north of Europe, and are popular in America. It is as a romance writer that he has met with such unbounded distinction. Who has not read Arne, and felt his heart beat faster with sympathy and delight? Who has not been refreshed by the simple story of the Fisher Girl? It seemed as though every kind of story writing had been abundantly tried, and as though a new novel must fall upon somewhat jaded ears. But in Björnsen one discovered an author who was always simple and yet always enchanting; whose spirit was as masculine as a Viking's and as pure and tender as a maiden's. Through these little romances there blows a wind as fragrant and refreshing as the odor of the Trondhjem balsam willows, blown out to sea to welcome the new-comer; and just as this rare scent is the first thing that tells the traveller of Norway, so the purity of Björnsen's novelettes is usually the first thing to attract a foreigner to Norwegian litera

ture.

But it is only with his poems that we have here to do. While in his stories he deals with peasant life, so in his dramas he draws his afflatus from the rich hoard of antique sagas. Mellem Slagene (Between the Battles') was the first of these saga plays. It is very fine. Two married folks-Halvard and Inga-once deeply in love with one another, begin mutually to tire, and to long, the man for the old wild, fighting life, the woman for her pleasant maiden days with her father. They get entangled in misconceptions, and a reserve creeping in on both sides parts them more and more. 'Silence slays more than sharp words do,' is the motto of the piece, a motto very suggestive to the undemonstrative people of the north. The two principal figures, and also that of King Sverre, are very keenly drawn. In 1858 there followed Halte Hulda (Lame Hulda'), the story of a girl who has lived to be four-and-twenty, loveless and unloved, full of grief and physically incapacitated by her lameness, and who suddenly falls into passionate and hopeless affection for a man she meets. Here again we have a dramatic situation, subtly chosen, original, and carefully worked out. Kong Sverre was the next

of these saga dramas, wherein the King Sverre, who acted a secondary part in Mellem Slagene, becomes chief and centre of interest. Much of the latter, however, gathers around the bishop, Nicolaus, one of Björnsen's most skilful pieces of figure painting. Sigurd Slembe (1862) closes the list of saga dramas. The author turned next to modern history, and published in 1864 Maria Stuart i Skotland (Mary Stuart in Scotland'), a piece which unfortunately suggests comparison with Schiller and other poets; it is written in prose. It could be wished that Björnsen had chosen some less hackneyed subject. His next effort was in quite a different line: De Nygifte (The Newly-married Couple') is a little prose comedy in high life. The hero having fallen violently in love with a girl too young to understand his character, finds out too late that she has no notion of the responsibilities of married life, and still prefers her parents to himself. He tries to cure her by wrenching her suddenly from all old associations, and though she is very sullen for a while, he is victorious at last, and wins her love. Björnsen has hardly allowed himself enough space in this little drama; the evolution of character is hurried by the shortness of the scenes; but it is nevertheless ably written. Lately he has published a volume of Songs and Poems.

With this writer we will draw our survey of Norwegian poetry to a close. Nothing has been said here about the verse written in the dialect of the peasants, which the great linguist Ivar Aasen, by moulding with the old Norse, has made a sort of new language of. This peasant Norse has a galvanic life imparted to it by the exertions of its inventor, and a good poet (K. Janson) has been found enthusiastic enough to write exclusively in it. The chief motive of the movement seems to be to make Norwegian literature more remote and undecipherable than ever; at least, such would be the effect if the enterprise succeeded. The creator of this language of the future, Aasen, is a man of high and versatile genius, and has himself contributed several poems to the new literature. For the rest its principal cultivators have been Vinje, the author, among other things, ot a rather truculent book on England, and Janson, a young writer of considerable activity. But this fancy language lies out of our province; if worth the consideration

of Englishmen at all, it should be studied separately.

We have now followed the literary life of this young nation for more than half a century. We have seen how the sudden political wrench, that divided it from its neighbor, gave it power to throw off the Danish influence and strike out a new path for itself. We have seen, too, how bravely, in spite of much weakness, and folly, and extravagance, it succeeded in doing this, and in becoming self-reliant and healthily critical; how, when the age of criticism had sobered and moulded it, it ceased to look outwards for artistic impressions, but sought in its own heart and soul for high and touching themes. The reader who has followed the history of this development will hardly fail to agree in looking for a golden future in store for the people

of Norway. Here we find a thinly peopled country of magnificent resources, a youth unexhausted by the effeminate life of towns, a language still fresh and unrifled. While Sweden falls deeper and deeper into an affected prettiness of style and mannered mediocrity, while Denmark turns like a sunflower to the witcheries of French plays and novels, Norway stands aloof, and bids her poets choose noble themes and treat them in an original and manly way. It is in this vigor that the great promise of her strength lies; she needs a school of writers that shall reflect the solemnity of her pine woods, the majesty of her mountains, and the wild splendor of her seas. Such a reflection we find in men like Björnsen and Ibsen, and we here would heartily wish them God speed, with three times three for Gamle Norge!

[From Fraser's Magazine.

AN HOUR WITH SOME OLD PEOPLE.

PART I.

SPRING IN A WORKHOUSE.

It was a soft delicious day in spring. The trees were budding into leaf, and some of the flowering shrubs in the gardens had already burst into blossom; and yet it was still so early that the recent inclemency of winter was fresh in the mind, and the brightness and loveliness of spring seemed the brighter and the lovelier by force of contrast. Purple tints rested on the hills, distant about ten miles from our dusty town; and who could help longing, on such a day, to "forsake the busy haunts of men," and exchange the hot pavement for their cool, elastic turf, and the varied hum of street-life for the soft, hushed murmurings of brook, and bird, and rustling leaf, the only sounds that break the silence of their beautiful solitudes!

There was a "languid sweetness" in the air, to which the bustle of market-day in a country-town seemed incongruous; and yet it was pleasant, too, to hear the busy market-folk, as they met in the streets, exchanging hearty sentences of congratulation on the beauty of the weather, as though they were, every one of them, the happier

for it.

Our errand conducted us away from the chief thoroughfares, gay with shops and

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thronged with prosperous well-to-d ple, through back streets and bye-lanes, into a quarter habited by some of the poorest classes of the inhabitants. We found ourselves walking along a straggling, irregular street, in which almost every house was of a different size and pattern, and only like its neighbors in never getting above a certain limit of ugliness and dinginess, within which this class of habitation seems to be doomed to be built. How dirty were the tribes of children that we saw as we passed by, playing in the gutter; how untidy the rough-haired women who now and then stepped out of the cottage-doors; how ragged and uneven the pavement, where the entrance of some court, or alley, abutted on the main street; how little, in short, there was, of anything that was pleasing to the eye, and how much. that stood out in strong and disagreeable relief against the bright background of sunshine and blue sky, making one's heart ache to think how little chance thousands of people have, of finding out how beautiful the world is.

What can the inhabitants of such a place as this know of spring? we felt inclined to ask. Can the freshness of the opening year touch such as these with any other feeling than one of mere physical satisfaction that it is warm, that the cruel cold of winter is gone by?

Almost every cottage window rebuked the question, for even the most neglectedlooking, where the muslin blind, that no decent cottage would be without, was dirtiest and most ragged, where broken panes of glass were mended with newspapers, or stopped with rag, was not without a silent acknowledgment of the coming of spring, in the shape of some mug, or broken pitcher, filled with primroses, or daffodils, sometimes with a straggling bit of blackthorn stuck unsymmetrically in in the

midst.

Of how much happiness were these posies the token! In childhood the coming into blossom of certain flowers form epochs in the year, joyfully anticipated, and affectionately remembered. It is a white day when the earliest violet is discovered, and the first blossom on the hawthorn is worth any pains that must be taken to gather it, and is brought home with triumph! What plans are laid in school as soon as it is known that primrare out, for flower gathering expeduo on weekly half-holidays! What delightful rambles when the day comes at last, through such lanes and fields as are attainable! What plunging of little hands into mossy banks, amongst the folded spires of the cuckoo pint, and the tiny fronds of baby ferns, each rolled up in its stiff green spiral!

Happy the children who have such innocent pleasures within reach! We were glad to know that less than a mile from the very dingiest and most brick-enclosed court or alley in that country-town were banks and hedgerows starred with thousands of primroses, as free to the raggedest street-child as to the best dressed little boy or girl in the place. [Alas, we speak of several years ago, and since then brick has been laid to brick, and roof has succeeded to roof, so that we cannot help pausing with a sigh, to wonder how many of those primrose-banks are yet left!]

The above reflections brought us to a large, wooden gate, crowned with spikes, and set in a stone wall of unusual height, defended at the top with bits of broken glass. Not without some little difficulty we pushed the heavy gate open, and found ourselves on a neatly gravelled road, enclosing a semicircular piece of turf, and leading to a large red brick building, a "many-windowed fabric huge," whose entire exterior, down to the very bricks,

seemed to our fancy to wear a stern air of official responsibility and formality.

Perhaps the framed placard which was almost the first thing that met our eyes, on crossing the threshold of this formidablelooking pile, and which contained a copy of some Act of Parliament relating to the treatment of REFRACTORY PAUPERS was hardly needed to make us aware that we were in the Union Workhouse. The placard was all in unreadably small print except these two words, whose large capitals seemed to glare at every one who entered in a severely admonitory manner.

The porter was out, and there was a little brown boy with a pale face and wistful eyes, that gave one the fancy that he must have been missing his mother without knowing it, all his poor little sickly life long, keeping the door in his stead. He knew us, and only smiled and pulled his forelock, as we crossed the entrancehall and entered a brick passage, between whose high brick walls, pierced with numerous doors, and open to the sky, we must cross the interior of the Workhouse quadrangle.

The first wall to our left was the wall of the dining-hall, and presently we passed. the open door of the kitchen, and had a glimpse of a stout woman busied over the fire, assisted by another woman in workhouse attire, and by a couple of girls from the school. The elder girls, we are told, are sent by turns into the kitchen, to learn what they can of cooking.

After this, more brick passage and more doors, over one of which the inscription "Casual Ward" is to be noticed. Since the Amateur Casual wrote his celebrated paper we have often glanced with interest through the open doorway of this ward; but the arrangements are quite unlike those described in the London Workhouse, except in the one particular that the floor is of brick. The entire ward is occupied by a single cumbrous piece of furniture, which might perhaps be called a compound bedstead. It is a huge wooden structure, with a high division in the centre, from which it is partitioned off into a series of cribs, each of which is covered with a dark-colored counterpane.

In a little while we found ourselves leaving the open brick passage for a covered way, which ended in a closed door, where we rang a bell, and were admitted into the Workhouse Hospital.

We seemed to have travelled a long way from the smiling weather outside, and to have reached an abode where day always wore a selfsame neutral tint. Save that we could see the distant blue of the sky far overhead, as we trod those brickpaved, brick-enclosed passages, what sign of the presence of spring had met us, since we entered the Workhouse door? Here, at last, we said to ourselves, going back to our former train of thought, we have come indeed to a region into which only some of the warmth, but little, or none, of the joy and beauty of spring can penetrate. And what if it were otherwise? What if this great building were some ancient palace of charity, of quaint and picturesque architecture, and standing in lovely garden-grounds, would any one of the inmates care for its beauty, or be one bit the happier for it, unless it contributed, in some measure, to personal comfort?

For who are the inmates of this building?

The sinful, the sorrowful, the suffering, the dregs and outcasts of society, who would die in the streets of vice and wretchedness, but for this refuge-beings, helpless and miserable, but not the less lawless and hard to rule; some few of the respectable poor, driven hither by temporary misfortune, and impatient to the last degree of the base contact into which it has brought them; children, some orphans, some deserted by their parents, many of them the offspring of the vagrant and criminal classes; sick people, too poor, too low down in the social scale, to hope for admission to any other hospital; old people, whose improvident lives find here their natural conclusion, and other old people, who, in being brought here, are overtaken by a fate which they have dreaded more than they dreaded death, and against which they struggled blindly for years, until the helplessness of age conquered them.

The workhouse is like a desolate island in the midst of a threatening sea. It is the sole resource of countless human waifs and strays, struggling in an ocean of difficulties; and, like a desolate island to shipwrecked mariners, it is at once a refuge and a prison. They are always looking out for some vessel to come and fetch them off, or they "tempt the waves once more," in some frail boat or raft, of their own construction; or if, after all, they resign them

selves to die where they are, they do it sadly and unwillingly. Food, warmth, and shelter; that they get in their desolate island, and for that, beaten and tossed by the waves of circumstance as they have been, they are often more thankful than those to whom the bare necessaries of life are matters of course, can well understand; but their lot has been shaped for them, not by choice, but by hard necessity, and there is little that is attractive in its aspect.

What difference can the beauty of spring make in such imprisoned lives? What is nature's smile in the world outside to the inmates of a workhouse?

To some, it is true, spring is the season of escape. It is warm, winter is over, the time is come for them to venture to leave their refuge, and try to pick up a living for themselves elsewhere. But there are, in every workhouse, a certain number of helpless beings who have never known, and never can know, any other home; and there are the aged, and the incurably sick, who once knew liberty, but have been forced to exchange freedom for food and shelter-what is the use of spring to them, except to excite longings for what they cannot have?

Wait! Let us see. For we have nearly reached our destination. The hospital door has been opened, and our question, "May we go into the Infirm Ward ?" has received an affirmative answer. Here is the door, with the name painted up outside. Were you ever in such a place ? No? Come in with us then, and see what it is like.

A large, oblong, four-windowed room, with whitewashed walls. Down each side of the room a row of beds, of which two or three have bedridden occupants; at the far end a fireplace, with a table near it, and some half-dozen old women dressed in blue gowns, and white aprons, and thick white cotton caps, sitting round in an irregular half circle, some on chairs, some on the ends of the nearest beds.

As we enter one of the old women round the fireplace rises, and comes forward with an exclamation of pleasure. She is a young person of about sixty-five, who has been selected for her youth and activity to have the care of the ward; that is, to use her own phraseology, it is her business to "do" for those old women who, through age and helplessness, can no longer "do" for themselves. And, on the whole, she is not

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