The youth, being at variance with the world,
lived in a state of intermittent warfare, and he gave and received
valiant blows, upon which he yet looks back with satisfaction.
In spite of his distaste for books Jonas Lie managed, when he was
eighteen years old, to pass the entrance examination to the University.
Among his schoolmates during his last year of preparation at Heltberg's
Gymnasium, in Christiania, were Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson and Henrik Ibsen.
The former took a great interest in the odd, _naive_, near-sighted
Nordlander who walked his own ways, thought his own thoughts, and
accepted ridicule with crushing indifference.
"I was going about there in Christiania," he says in a published letter
to Bjoernson, "as a young student, undeveloped, dim, and unclear--a kind
of poetic visionary, a Nordland twilight nature--which after a fashion
espied what was abroad in the age, but indistinctly in the dusk, as
through a water telescope--when I met a young, clear, full-born force,
pregnant with the nation's new day, the blue steel-flash of
determination in his eyes and the happily found national
form--pugnacious to the very point of his pen.
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