Young is my heart and free from fear--
Better the walls to be scaling
Than here in my prison lie wailing.
"One day, I know, shall my soul free roam
Over the lofty mountains.
Oh, my God, fair is thy home,
Ajar is the door for all who come;
Guard it for me yet longer,
Till my soul through striving grows stronger."

At the age of eleven Bjornson's school days began at Molde,
and were continued at Christiania in a famous preparatory
school, where he had Ibsen for a comrade. He entered the
university in his twentieth year, but his career was not
brilliant from a scholastic point of view, and he was too much
occupied with his own intellectual concerns to be a model student.
From his matriculation in 1852, to the appearance of his first
book in 1857, he was occupied with many sorts of literary
experiments, and became actively engaged in journalism. The
theatre, in particular, attracted him, for the theatre was one
of the chief foci of the intellectual life of his country (as
it should be in every country), and he plunged into dramatic
criticism as the avowed partisan of Norwegian ideals, holding
himself, in some sort, the successor of Wergeland, Who had died
about ten years earlier. Before becoming a dramatic critic, he
had essayed dramatic authorship, and the acceptance by the theatre
of his juvenile play, "Valborg," had led to a somewhat unusual
result. He was given a free ticket of admission, and a few
weeks of theatre-going opened his eyes to the defects of his own
accepted work, which he withdrew before it had been inflicted