This keen sense of nature is common to all Björnson's Norse characters of the olden time. He has imparted to them his own modern feelings. The little epic poem, "Amljot Gelline" (consisting of fifteen brief cantos), in particular, is unsurpassed for the beauty of its descriptions of nature. The song, "During the Springtime Inundation," describing the plunge which the mountain streams, swollen by the water from the melting snow, make into the valleys below, and the anxious huddling together in the mountain caves of the terrified wild beasts, paints in indelible colors an annual episode of Norwegian nature, transplanted some eight hundred years into the past, and which is consequently rendered wilder and more forcible than at the present day. The canto "Amljot's Yearning for the Ocean," in whose rhythm we feel the monotonous ebb and flow of the sea, is one of the most beautiful of all the poems that have ever portrayed the poetry of the sea. Byron had depicted the unruliness, the inexorableness, the fury of the ocean; Björnson paints the deep melancholy, the phlegmatic coldness, the ransoming freshness of the surging billows. Listen to the opening stanzas of the poem:-- "The sea I long for, the mighty ocean, That onward rolls in its calm majestic; With banks of billowy vapor freighted, To meet itself it doth ever wander. The sky may lower, the shore may signal, The sea recedes not, nor pauses ever; In summer nights, 'mid the storms of winter, Its billows murmur the self-same yearning. "The sea I pine for, ah, yes! the ocean, With brow so cold tow'rd the heaven lifted. Behold how earth in the sea casts shadows, And whispering mirrors there all her sorrows! The sun tho' strokes it with warm, bright touches, Of life's delights utters words intrepid; Yet ever ice-cold, mournfully peaceful It buries sorrow and consolation. "The full moon draws it, the tempest rouses, Yet vain all effort to stay its current; Laid waste tho' the lowland, tho' mountains crumble, It grandly sweeps tow'rd eternity. Yet all it draws must its waves close over; What once is sunk in the sea never rises. No shrieks are heard, and reveal'd no message, The ocean's language there's none can interpret. "Then seek the sea, go out on the ocean, All ye who never can know atonement! To all who sorrow it brings deliv'rance, Yet onward carries its own enigma. That singular bond with Death but consider, It gives him all but itself--the ocean. "Thy melancholy allures me, O ocean! My feeble plans how they fade and dwindle; I swiftly banish my anxious yearnings; Thy cold, cold breath brings peace to my bosom."