The vagabond from Nordland has his own adventures, his _bonnes fortunes_. There is a touch of Sterne about the book; not the exaggerated super-Sterne of Tristram Shandy, with eighteenth-century-futurist blanks and marbled pages, but the fluent, casual, follow-your-fancy Sterne of the _Sentimental Journey_. Yet the vagabond himself is unobtrusive, ready to step back and be a chronicler the moment other figures enter into constellation. He moves among youth, himself no longer young, and among gentlefolk, as one making no claim to equal rank. Both these features are accentuated further in the story of the Wanderer with the Mute. It is a continuation of _Under Høststjærnen_, and forms the culmination, the acquiescent close, of the self-expressional series that began with _Sult_. The discords of tortured loveliness are now resolved into an ultimate harmony of comely resignation and rich content. “A Wanderer may come to fifty years; he plays more softly then. Plays with muted strings.” This is the keynote of the book. The Wanderer is no longer young; it is for youth to make the stories old men tell. Tragedy is reserved for those of high estate; a wanderer in corduroy, “such as labourers wear here in the south,” can tell the story of his chatelaine and her lovers with the self-repression of a humbler Henry Esmond, winning nothing for himself even at the last, yet feeling he is still in Nature’s debt. Hamsun’s next work is _Den Siste Glæde_ (literally “The Last Joy”). The title as it stands is expressive. The substantive is “joy”--but it is so qualified by the preceding “last,” a word of overwhelming influence in any combination, that the total effect is one of sadness. And the book itself is a masterly presentment of gloom. Masterly--or most natural: it is often hard to say how much of Hamsun’s effect is due to superlative technique and how much to the inspired disregard of all technique. _Den Siste Glæde_ is a diary of wearisome days, spent for the most part among unattractive, insignificant people at a holiday resort; the only “action” in it is an altogether pitiful love affair, in which the narrator is involved to the slightest possible degree. The writer is throughout despondent; he feels himself out of the race; his day is past. Solitude and quiet, Nature, and his own foolish feelings--these are the “last joys” left him now. The book might have seemed a fitting, if pathetic, ending to the literary career of the author of _Pan_. Certainly it holds out no promise of further energy or interest in life or work. The closing words amount to a personal farewell.