A score of years before, in a valley of the far north, a group of eager and silent listeners stood gathered about one man, who spoke aloud with fervent and rapturous oratory.
It was in the green Norwegian spring, when the silence of the winter world had given way to a million sounds of waking life from budding leaves and nesting birds, and melting torrents and warm winds fanning the tender primrose into being, and wooing the red alpine rose to blossom.
The little valley was peopled by a hardy race of herdsmen and of fishers; men who kept their goat-flocks on the steep sides of the mountains, or went down to the deep waters in search of a scanty subsistence. But they were a people simple, noble, grave, even in a manner heroic and poetic, a people nurtured on the old grand songs of a mighty past, and holding a pure faith in the traditions of a great sea-sovereignty. They listened, breathless, to the man who addressed them, raised on a tribune of rough rock, and facing the ocean, where it stretched at the northward end of the vale; a man peasant-born himself, but gifted with a native eloquence, half-poet, half-preacher; fanatic and enthusiast; one who held it as his errand to go to and fro the land, raising his voice against the powers of the world, and of wealth, and who spoke against these with a fervor and force which, to the unlearned and impressionable multitudes that heard him, seemed the voice of a genius heaven-sent.
When a boy he had been a shepherd, and dreaming in the loneliness of the mountains, and by the side of the deep hill-lakes far away from any sound or steps of human life, a madness, innocent, and in its way beautiful, had come upon him.
He believed himself born to carry the message of grace to the nations; and to raise his voice up against those passions whose fury had never assailed him, and against those riches whose sweetness he had never tasted. So he had wandered from city to city, from village to village; mocked in some places, revered in others; protesting always against the dominion of wealth, and speaking with a strange pathos and poetry which thrilled the hearts of his listeners, and had almost in it, at times, the menace and the mystery of a prophet's upbraiding.
He lived very poorly; he was gentle as a child; he was a cripple and very feeble; he drank at the wayside rills with the dogs; he lay down on the open fields with the cattle; yet he had a power in him that had its sway over the people, and held the scoffers and the jesters quiet under the spell of his tender and flutelike tones.
Raised above the little throng upon the bare red rock, with the vast green fields and dim pine-woods stretching round him as far as his eye could reach, he preached now to the groups of fishers and herdsmen and foresters and hunters; protesting to this simple people against the force of wealth, and the lust of possession, as though he preached to princes and to conquerors. He told them of what he had seen in the great cities through which he had wandered; of the corruption and the vileness and the wantonness; of the greed in which the days and the years of men's lives were spent; of the amassing of riches for which alone the nations cared, so that all loveliness, all simplicity, all high endeavor, all innocent pastime, were abjured and derided among them. And his voice was sweet and full as the swell of music as he spoke to them, telling them one of the many fables and legends, of which he had gathered a full harvest, in the many lands that had felt his footsteps.
This was the parable he told them that day, whilst the rude toilers of the forests and the ocean stood quiet as little children, hearkening with upturned faces and bated breath, as the sun went down behind the purple pines:
"There lived once in the East, a great king; he dwelt far away, among the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never set.
"He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and the people as they hewed stone or brought water, said among themselves, 'Verily, this man is as a god; he goes where he lists, and he lies still or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits off all lands are culled for him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as he wills.' But the people were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.