... Both with its
[Norway's scenery's] violence and brusqueness and with its
surprising gentleness Bj?rnson has kinship." The last line of the
poem includes the poet himself.
Note 70.
HOLGER DRACHMANN. Probably written in 1879. This Danish productive
author (and painter), best known as lyric poet and novelist, was
born in 1846 and died in 1908. Here he received from Bj?rnson a
reply to verses of homage addressed by him to the latter in 1878.
Drachmann's early years were turbulent and revolutionary, full of
feuds with everybody. He belonged to the literary and esthetic Left,
opposing all existing institutions. Bj?rnson's characterization
exhibits Drachmann at the height of his poetic production.
His most popular prose book had recently stirred the Danish national
heart and roused the spirit of Scandinavism. The collections of his
poems: Songs by the Sea, Tendrils and Roses, Youth in Poem and Song,
he never surpassed. Perhaps the best were the group of Venetian
Songs, written in Venice in the spring of 1876, to which time
belongs also his finest story, Two Shots. During the next decade
Drachmann underwent an extreme conservative reaction, but about 1890
returned again to his youthful passion for rebellion, romantic
radicalism, and the religion of esthetic freedom.
Note 71.
A MEETING. Hans Thorvald Brecke was born December 1, 1847, and died
June 9, 1875.
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