"Make way for me, thou heavy hammer,
To the heart's most secret chamber."
Ibsen seeks the solitary silence of night. In his poem "Lysræd" (Afraid of Light), he declares that as a child he was afraid of being in the dark; but that everything has become changed, the glare of daylight now bewilders him, the noise of life makes him weak and ready to swoon away. Only hid beneath the shelter of night's veil of terror, his will is armed for deeds of daring. Without the cover of night he is helpless, and he well knows that if ever he accomplishes a great work, it will be a deed of darkness.
In the spirited and beautiful words of the poem the author has depicted his own temperament. The nature of Björnson, on the contrary, does not strive downward; its aspirations rise upward and outward. His genius has open arms.
Another contrast between the two poets may be felt in the Northern dramas penned by both during their first period. As a born dramatist, Ibsen has no bent, no inclination, for descriptions of nature. His principal dramatic characters, in his youth, were personifications of an idea, not modelled directly from nature, and in his almost exceptionally dramatic poems, exterior nature necessarily plays but an evanescent rôle. Even where nature is introduced by him, with most thrilling effect, as in the "ice-church" in "Brand," it is rather as a symbol than as a reality; the ice-church is the church in which he who forsakes the established churches runs great danger of meeting his end. The freer, more expansive spirit of Björnson dwells lingeringly on the natural surroundings of Norway and imparts the impressions received from them to his dramas. Let us give as an example of this the scene between Sigurd and the Finnish maiden, one of the most beautiful scenes that Björnson has written. When the maiden, announced by her long quavering shout of exultation, steps upon the stage, she brings with her the entire nature of the Northland, as her realm. The daughter of the Finnish chieftain reveals herself as a glimpse of the radiance of the Northern Lights; her words have the brilliant charm of the midnight sun; her glad love of life, of the sunshine of summer, her unreciprocated love for Sigurd, the delicate and transitory nature of her sorrow,—all this is a fragment of the living poetry of nature. Masterly, indeed, is the description of her appearance given by Sigurd.
"The Finnish Maiden.—Can you feel how beautiful it is here?"
"Sigurd.—Oh, yes! at times I can. When I stand before my cavern and gaze upon the eternal snow;—o'er it the tree-tops by twilight resemble weird spectres, each other approaching. Then you, on your snowshoes, come stormily down the mountains; all your dogs are around you, your troop follows after, and the size of all seems to grow three times larger. O'er your wild and blustering train, and this world of enchanting romance around it, the Northern Lights, with their brilliant colors and forms, now congregating, now spreading wide their splendor...."
This keen sense of nature is common to all Björnson's Norse characters of the olden time. He has imparted to them his own modern feelings. The little epic poem, "Amljot Gelline" (consisting of fifteen brief cantos), in particular, is unsurpassed for the beauty of its descriptions of nature. The song, "During the Springtime Inundation," describing the plunge which the mountain streams, swollen by the water from the melting snow, make into the valleys below, and the anxious huddling together in the mountain caves of the terrified wild beasts, paints in indelible colors an annual episode of Norwegian nature, transplanted some eight hundred years into the past, and which is consequently rendered wilder and more forcible than at the present day. The canto "Amljot's Yearning for the Ocean," in whose rhythm we feel the monotonous ebb and flow of the sea, is one of the most beautiful of all the poems that have ever portrayed the poetry of the sea. Byron had depicted the unruliness, the inexorableness, the fury of the ocean; Björnson paints the deep melancholy, the phlegmatic coldness, the ransoming freshness of the surging billows. Listen to the opening stanzas of the poem:—
"The sea I long for, the mighty ocean,
That onward rolls in its calm majestic;
With banks of billowy vapor freighted,
To meet itself it doth ever wander.
The sky may lower, the shore may signal,
The sea recedes not, nor pauses ever;
In summer nights, 'mid the storms of winter,
Its billows murmur the self-same yearning.
"The sea I pine for, ah, yes! the ocean,
With brow so cold tow'rd the heaven lifted.
Behold how earth in the sea casts shadows,
And whispering mirrors there all her sorrows!
The sun tho' strokes it with warm, bright touches,
Of life's delights utters words intrepid;
Yet ever ice-cold, mournfully peaceful
It buries sorrow and consolation.
"The full moon draws it, the tempest rouses,
Yet vain all effort to stay its current;
Laid waste tho' the lowland, tho' mountains crumble,
It grandly sweeps tow'rd eternity.
Yet all it draws must its waves close over;
What once is sunk in the sea never rises.
No shrieks are heard, and reveal'd no message,
The ocean's language there's none can interpret.
"Then seek the sea, go out on the ocean,
All ye who never can know atonement!
To all who sorrow it brings deliv'rance,
Yet onward carries its own enigma.
That singular bond with Death but consider,
It gives him all but itself—the ocean.
"Thy melancholy allures me, O ocean!
My feeble plans how they fade and dwindle;
I swiftly banish my anxious yearnings;
Thy cold, cold breath brings peace to my bosom."
The music of the waves here produces the effect of a magnificent cradle song. It is one to the dreaming hero whose great hope is that he may be able to see the nails give way in the planks of his ship, as death opens the portals to the stream of ransoming waters, and himself, covered by eternal silence, rest in the depths below, while in sublime moonlight nights, when the silver sheen of the moonbeams plays on the mighty surface, "the waves his name tow'rd the strand are rolling."