A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden / 2nd edition

by William A. Ross

Whether it were in the air which I breathed, or whether it were caught from the solemn magnificence of the scenery, the same feeling of sublimity came over me as when I first saw the land of Norway on my arrival from England; and, I do not know how to account for the impression, but during the whole time I remained in Norway, and whenever I was left alone to wander along its fiords, or over its mountains, I gave way, as in England, to no extreme sensations of delight or sorrow; but a consciousness of awe weighed eternally upon my mind, and, released from the tumultuous passions of joy or dejection, a desire, created as it were by the visible perception of perfect natural beauty, was ever present to embody itself with the sights of grandeur that soared and sank above and below me.

Silently, as if without a breath of wind, the cutter crept up the Gulf, the beauties of which increased the farther we advanced; the bays—the vessels glancing among the rocks with their white sails in the sun—the cultivated patches of land—and the neat wooden farm-houses amid the desolation of the mountains, were novel and interesting objects. The great variety of the underwood, and the diversified colours of the foliage, were beautifully blended with the darker tints of the fir which grew along the sides, and on the tops, of the high hills; and how well does their sombre gloom mate with the stern magnificence of the rocks!

On the islands, the birch, the hazel, the alder, and the ash, cast their shadows over the water, and are there reflected in their minutest lineaments; nor are their trunks and branches more sharply defined in the air above, than they are imaged in the watery mirror below, the transparency of the water in no way yielding to the clearness of the atmosphere; since, as the abruptly-rising rocks tower proportionally into the air, their steep, bold sides are plunged perpendicularly into the sea, and seem to descend till the eye loses them in its green depth.

Here and there the islands are inhabited by peasants; and flocks of sheep and goats ceased, as the yacht passed them, to browse on the low herbage which springs beneath the rocky coppice; and before the cottage-doors half-clad children stood still, and gaped, then called aloud to fishermen who were hanging out their nets to dry, or setting them for fish around the shores of their sea-girt homes.

Beyond this, nowhere are seen or heard the sights or sounds of man's habitation, and, hushed in painful tranquillity and profound solitude, the interior recesses of the fiord show no signs of life. With all their storm-beaten antiquity, gaunt and inhospitable, the skeletons of land rather than the land itself,—the grey and rugged crags—alone appear between the coppice and the short scanty grass which, ever when the wind came to breathe gently on our sails, sighed and moaned amid the general repose.

About twenty miles from Christiania the fiord narrows to two miles, and holds that breadth up to the city. The town of Christiania is hid by a small island from the sight of the traveller approaching it by water; but at a great distance we could, while winding up the fiord, catch a glimpse of the white houses sleeping in a valley, surrounded by high mountains. At eight o'clock in the afternoon—for there is not much night—we dropped anchor off the town.

Christiania stands low; but the land slopes gradually from the shore of the fiord till it loses itself on the hazy tops of the mountains. When the sky is partially obscured by masses of clouds, the appearance of Christiania, seen from the deck of a vessel in the harbour, is very beautiful; that part of the town, near the water, shining brightly in the sunlight, while the remoter suburbs, at the back, being canopied by the heavy vapours that hang around the peaks of the mountains, look black as night.

As soon as the anchor was let go, we went ashore, as usual, to make inquiries about salmon; and received as much encouragement as at Falkenborg and Kongsbacka. The time, however, had not yet quite arrived when the salmon-fishery commenced; and a few days devoted to Christiania would not debar us from any amusement attached to the long-desired sport. We brought several letters of introduction; and, among them, one to the Viceroy of Christiania; but we did not present our letter to the old Count, all the information and hospitality we desired being amply given to us by the British Consul-General.

There is nothing to see in Christiania, the most conspicuous object being the palace, which stands, like a manufactory, on the top of a rising piece of ground. It is an enormous pile of building, painted uniformly white; and I do not believe the interior is more commodious than the exterior is monotonous and void of architectural taste, since the late King, Bernadotte, once observed, when he entered it, that he saw a multitude of rooms, but would be glad to know which apartment he was to live in.

The same kind of mirrors that I had seen at Copenhagen and Gottenborg projected outside the windows here, so that no one need move from his chair to know all that occurs in the street; and this is also an important exemption, for the casements of nearly all the houses in Christiania are double, for the purpose of warmth. Large archways lead to larger yards, into which the houses open, and street-doors are almost dispensed with. Neither do the buildings ascend to any great altitude, but two stories are, for the most part, considered the orthodox height. The shop windows are not gay, and the name and pursuit of their owners are badly lettered, and in hieroglyphics I could not read.