There he sits, while his most beautiful poetic visions glide in nebulous form before his eyes. He sees the River Styx. Venus, Urania, and Endymion sail in a boat down the stream, while the crown which Venus wears casts a brilliant starry sheen over the gloomy waves and shores. He sees Amor and Psyche blissfully floating by in lofty Kassiopeia and proud Orion; he descries Adam and Alma gliding past, all closely wrapped in the purifying flames of purgatory; he beholds Alexander kneeling before Kalanus, and the slender, refined form of the Indian, with the white bandage about his brow, and singing his swan's song, ascend from the funeral pyre through the smoke and the black clouds to Brahma. "At the feet of her, his goddess, Happy now he sits and dreams; All aglow death's kingdom seems," while his works survive him and render his name immortal. There was always a great deal of sky in his paintings, but his name will be most enduringly united with that part of his pictures which portrays earth and the earthly. [1] Now the Empress of Russia. [Illustration: BJÖRNSTJERNE BJÖRNSON.] BJÖRNSTJERNE BJÖRNSON. 1882. Beyond his fatherland Björnstjerne Björnson is known as a great poet. To Norway he is more than a poet. Not only has he written beautiful stories, songs, and dramas for his people; he lives the daily life of this people, and holds unbroken intercourse with them. He who has it in his power to create the most refined, the most delicate poetry, does not esteem himself above the rudest tasks, those of the journalist and the popular orator, where there is a question of furthering the moral and political education of the Norwegian people, by combating an error or a lie, or by ensuring the propagation of some simple, but as yet unrecognized truth. There emanates from him a breath of life. Where his spirit now penetrates there follows a development of self-knowledge and love of truth, national faults are shaken off, a growing interest is manifested in all intellectual topics, all public affairs, and a wholesome self-confidence appears side by side with this interest. He has grasped the significance of the poet's mission in its broadest sense. In his oration at the unveiling of the Wergeland monument, May 17, 1881, Björnson said of his great predecessor, the European poet, who ranks next to Shelley:-- "You have all heard how Henrik Wergeland, during one period of his life, was in the habit of carrying his pockets full of the seeds of trees, ever and anon strewing a handful of these about him in his daily walks, and how he endeavored to persuade his associates to do the same, because no one could know what the results might be. This is so true-hearted, so touchingly poetic an instance of patriotism, that it stands on the pinnacle of the best he has written."