The occasional songs and poems in celebration of great personalities,
--whether they were of high station and renown, or lowly and unfamed,
--or for festivals, earnest or jovial, are nearly all conceived in the
spirit of patriotism,--love of Norway, its historic past, its present,
its future. They may be social songs memorial or political poems,
ballads or lyrical romances,--all are inspired by and inspire love of country.
Not very many of Bj?rnson's lyrics have love as their subject. From
his tales, novels, and dramas we know that his understanding of love
was comprehensive and subtle, yet this volume contains but few of
the love-lyrics of strong emotion, which Bj?rnson must have felt,
if not written. He was a man of will and action with altruistic
ideals; sexual love could not be the whole nor the center of life
for him.
Nor are the purely religious poems numerous, although Christian faith
is at once the ground and the atmosphere of his lyrics in the earlier
period, and some of the latest are expressions of a broad and deep
philosophy of life. "Love thy neighbor!" and "Light, Love, Life" in
deeds were characteristic of Bj?rnson, rather than the utterance of
passive meditations of a theoretic nature on God and man's relation to Him.
Bj?rnson's unfailing bent towards activity in behalf of others could
not favor either the lyric outpouring of other purely personal moods.
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