Note 19. BERGEN. Written in 1863 for a musical festival in which Björnson and Ibsen took part. Bergen's unusually favorable situation made it for a long time Norway's first city in commerce; it has only recently fallen behind Christiania. It has ever had a large local fleet and great traffic in its harbor. Founded about 1070 by King Olaf the Quiet, Bergen was very important in the older history of the land, as the residence of the Kings, until about 1350, when Hanseatic control began, continuing until late in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century Bergen was incomparably the first commercial city in the Danish-Norwegian monarchy; in the eighteenth it was surpassed by Copenhagen. The people of Bergen have always been distinctly liberal in thought and feeling. Holberg, Ludvig (1684-1754), was born in Bergen, but resided in most of his life in Denmark. His comedies, which founded modern Danish-Norwegian literature, are indeed immortal. Dahl, John Christian Clausen (1788-1857), a Norwegian landscape painter, who, though born in Bergen, went in 1811 to Copenhagen and from 1818 resided in Dresden. As subjects he preferred water, rock, and strand, and showed a realistic tendency in his light-effects. Welhaven, see Note 36. Ole Bull (1810-1880), a violinist of world-wide renown. In his later life he passed most of his time in the United States, but every year he returned to the home which he maintained near Bergen, at a distance of about two hours by steamer. Carrying out a plan conceived in 1848, he established in Bergen with his own means the first Norwegian National Theater, which was opened January 2, 1850. Collin says that the last line of the poem sums up Björnson's view of Norway's historical memories as motive power for new achievement. This seems realized in Bergen's recent development,--it now had the largest steam-fleet of all the cities in Norway.