"
When he was but a few years old his father removed, in various official
capacities, to Mandal, Soendhordland, and, finally, to the city of
Tromsoe, in Nordland. It was here, in the extreme north, that Jonas
spent the years of his boyhood, and it was this wild, enchanted region
which put the deepest impress upon his spirit.
"In Nordland," he says in "The Visionary," the hero of which is
essentially the Finnish half of himself, "all natural phenomena are
intense, and appear in colossal contrasts. There is an endless,
stony-gray desert as in primeval times, before men dwelt there; but in
the midst of this are also endless natural riches. There is sun and
glory of summer, the day of which is not only twelve hours, but lasts
continuously, day and night, for three months--a warm, bright,
fragrance-laden summer, with an infinite wealth of color and changing
beauty. Distances of seventy to eighty miles across the mirror of the
sea approach, as it were, within earshot. The mountains clothe
themselves up to the very top with greenish-brown grass, and in the
glens and ravines the little birches join hands for play, like white,
sixteen-year-old girls; while the fragrance of the strawberry and
raspberry fills the air as nowhere else; and the day is so hot that you
feel a need to bathe yourself in the sun-steeped, plashing sea, so
wondrously clear to the very bottom.
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