Hamsun’s poet-personality, the spirit we have seen striving for expression through the figures of Nagel, Glahn, Johannes, and the rest, is a creature of _feeling_. And here the development proceeds on altogether different lines. The emotion which fails to find adequate outlet, even in such works as _Sult_, _Mysterier_, _Victoria_, and _Pan_, might well seem more of a peril than the quixotic stubbornness of Kareno’s philosophy. Such a flood, in its tempestuous unrest, might seem to threaten destruction, or at best the vain dispersal of its own power into chaos. But by some rare guidance it is led, after the storm of _Munken Vendt_, into channels of beneficent fertility. In 1904, after an interval of short stories, letters of travel, and poems, came the story entitled _Sværmere_. The word means “Moths.” It also stands for something else; something for which we English, as a sensible people, have no word. Something pleasantly futile, deliciously unprofitable--foolish lovers, hovering like moths about a lamp. But there is more than this that is untranslatable in the title. _As_ a title it suggests an attitude of gentleness, tenderness, sympathy, towards whomsoever it describes. It is a new note in Hamsun; the opening of a new _motif_. The main thread of the story bears a certain similarity to that of _Mysterier_, _Victoria_, and _Pan_, being a love affair of mazy windings, a tangled skein of loves-me-loves-me-not. But it is pure comedy throughout. Rolandsen, the telegraph operator in love with Elise Mack, is no poet; he has not even any pretensions to education or social standing. He is a cheerful, riotous “blade,” who sports with the girls of the village, gets drunk at times, and serenades the parson’s wife at night with his guitar. _Sværmere_ is the slightest of little stories in itself, but full of delightful vagaries and the most winning humour. It is the first of Hamsun’s stories with a happy ending. The story of _Benoni_, with its continuation _Rosa_, is in like vein; a tenderly humorous portrayal of love below stairs, the principal characters being chosen from the class who appear as supers in _Pan_; subjects or retainers of the all-powerful Trader Mack. It is as if the sub-plot in one of Shakespeare’s plays had been taken out for separate presentment, and the clown promoted to be hero in a play of his own. The cast is increased, the _milieu_ lightly drawn in _Pan_ is now shown more comprehensively and in detail, making us gradually acquainted with a whole little community, a village world, knowing little of any world beyond, and forming a microcosm in itself.