So close against the hills the city stands that a short electric railway lifts one in a few minutes from the streets to the heart of the spruce woods that cover the rock sides of Hollmenkollen. Among granite boulders and such wild flowers as Scotland knows, under the close shade of the pines—the woods untouched, save here and there, as if miles from a dwelling of man—one looks down on the streets of a city that lies among the mountains and yet borders upon the rippling sea. Still closer to the streets of Stockholm the forests come, but there the hills stand back. In being both girdled by mountains and splashed by the sea Christiania is almost alone among the capitals of the world.
Norway is almost always seen by visitors under summer skies, unless it chances that they come for winter sports; it is well somewhat to correct the impressions received by recalling Björnson's holding description of his own country: "There is something in Nature here which challenges whatever is extraordinary in us. Nature herself here goes beyond all ordinary measure. We have night nearly all the winter; we have day nearly all the summer, with the sun by day and by night above the horizon. You have seen it at night half-veiled by the mists from the sea; it often looks three, even four times larger than usual. And then the play of colours on sky, sea and rock, from the most glowing red to the softest and most delicate yellow and white. And then the colours of the Northern Lights on the winter sky, with their more suppressed kind of wild pictures, yet full of unrest and for ever changing. Then the other wonders of Nature! These millions of sea-birds, and the wandering processions of fish, stretching for miles! These perpendicular cliffs that rise directly out of the sea! They are not like other mountains, and the Atlantic roars round their feet. And the ideas of the people are correspondingly unmeasured. Listen to their legends and stories."
CHAPTER V
ROSKILDE
Between fair fields the fjord
With winding waters, snake-like,
Creeps inward from the salt sea.
Where viking hordes have harried,
Fare peaceful folk to market.
High tower the tall twin spires.
Beneath, in silent splendour
Lie the dead kings of Dane-realm.
This pleasant, quiet country town is named from its springs, referred to in the last part of the word (p. [115]). The uncertainty about the first syllable has apparently led to the invention of a founder named Roe, who seems to have so much in common with Port of Portsmouth and King Cole of Colchester—that he never existed except to account for a name.