upon the public. The full consciousness of his poetical calling
came to him upon his return from a student gathering at the
university town of Upsala, whither he had gone as a special
correspondent. "When I came home from the journey," 'he says,
"I slept three whole days with a few brief intervals for eating and
conversation. Then I wrote down my impressions of the journey,
but just because I had first lived and then written, the account
got style and color; it attracted attention, and made me all the
more certain that the hour had come. I packed up, went home,
thought it all over, wrote and rewrote `Between the Battles' in
a fortnight, and travelled to Copenhagen with the completed piece
in my trunk; I would be a poet." He then set to writing "Synnove
Solbakken," published it in part as a newspaper serial, and then
in book form, in the autumn of 1857. He had "commenced author"
in good earnest.

The next fifteen years of Bjornson's life were richly productive.
Within a single year he had published "Arne," the second of his
peasant idyls and perhaps the most remarkable of them all, and had
also published two brief dramas, "Halte-Hulda" and the one already
mentioned as the achievement of fourteen feverish days. The
remaining product of the fifteen years includes two more prose
idyls, "A Happy Boy" and "The Fisher Maiden" (with a considerable
number of small pieces similar in character); three more plays
drawn from the treasury of old Norse history, "King Sverre,"
"Sigurd Slembe," and "Sigurd Jorsalfar"; a dramatic setting of
the story of "Mary Stuart in Scotland"; a little social comedy,
"The Newly Married Couple," which offers a foretaste of his later
exclusive preoccupation with modern life; "Arnljot Gelline," his
only long poem, a wild narrative of the clash between heathendom