of friendship with the genial, although eccentric, Aasmund Vinje, who had already won a name as a dialect poet, as well as with the historian Ernst Sars, a young man of his own age, who did not become known to fame until later, and overflowing with youthful spirits, he led a life agitated by many and varied intellectual pursuits. The Danish theatre, at that time under the most careful management, interested him and exercised the most lively influence upon him. When, in the year 1852, he returned as a student to the parental roof, and passed there a year, the life of the people was revealed to him in a new light. He lived with the people, and wrote popular songs, which were often committed to memory and sung by the peasants. Returned to Christiania, he came before the public as a critic, especially as a dramatic critic, wrote with all the vehemence of genial youth, with all the injustice of a rising poet, and gained many enemies. In his reading at this period, he gave the preference to Danish thinkers of the epoch in literature then drawing to a close,--Heiberg, Sibbern, Kierkegaard,--and a little later he became gradually absorbed in the emotional world of Grundtvig. The latter's doctrine of a "cheerful Christianity" attracted Björnson as the antithesis of the gloomy pietism of his native land, the strong faith in the lofty endowments and mission of the Scandinavian North, which he found in Grundtvig, could not but captivate this typically northern youth who was so wholly unacquainted with Europe. Until a very few years ago traces of Grundtvig's influence could be detected in him. Even at the present time it is not wholly obliterated. In those early days he found within the boundaries of Grundtvigianism all that which later, when he had torn himself free from the magic spell of Grundtvig's sphere, he sought and found, outside of these limits,--humanity in its highest freedom and beauty. This was the result of the narrowness of his horizon. The conclusions of modern philosophy and social science had not been introduced in those days into the university of Christiania. Valuable results were accomplished in specialties, but intellectual intercourse with Europe was otherwise cut off here as well as in Denmark. In fact there was no European consciousness at the university. The priest's son from a retired village, the scholar from a small city, was not removed, even in the metropolis, from the circles of variously shaded orthodoxy. Hence the circumscribed, sometimes childish element in Björnson's first works; hence the self-sufficient naïveté, so unique of its kind, which at this period constitutes his strength as a poet.