The story is full of instances illustrating precision, energy, and delicacy. In fact, almost any passage exemplifies the general qualities of form and the qualities of composition. The personality of the writer has given to the tale a poetic and dramatic charm of simplicity. Note the precision and delicacy displayed in the opening paragraph:—
Oeyvind was his name. A low barren cliff overhung the house in which he was born; fir and birch looked down on the roof, and wild cherry strewed flowers over it. Upon this roof there walked about a little goat, which belonged to Oeyvind. He was kept there that he might not go astray; and Oeyvind carried leaves and grass up to him. One fine day the goat leaped down, and away to the cliff; he went straight up and came where he never had been before.
Energy is apparent in the following passage:—
"Is it yours, this goat?" asked the girl again.
"Yes," he said, and looked up.
"I have taken such a fancy to the goat. You will not give it to me?"
"No, that I won't."
She lay kicking her legs and looking down at him, and then she said, "But if I give you a butter-cake for the goat, can I have him then?"
The justness of expression, the sincerity, is especially impressive when Oeyvind's Mother came out and sat down by his side when the goat no longer satisfied him and he wanted to hear stories of what was far away. There is emotional harmony too, because the words suggest the free freshness of the mountain air and the landscape which rose round about the Boy and his Mother.
So she told him how once everything could talk: "The mountain talked to the stream, and the stream to the river, the river to the sea, and the sea to the sky."—But then he asked if the sky did not talk to any one: "And the sky talked to the clouds, the clouds to the trees, the trees to the grass, the grass to the flies, the flies to the animals, the animals to the children, the children to the grown-up people…." Oeyvind looked at the mountain, the trees, and the sky and had never seen them before.