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Peder was in the boat, rejoiced to be with us again; and we had no sooner gotten under way, than he began singing, "Frie dig ved lifvet." It was an intensely hot day, and the shores of Ulvik were perfectly dazzling. The turf had a silken gloss; the trees stood darkly and richly green, and the water was purest sapphire.
So, when we had traversed the upper land for several miles, we came to a brink overlooking another branch of the lower land, and descended through thick woods to the farms of Ulvik, on the Eyfjord, an arm of the Hardanger. The shores were gloriously beautiful; slopes of dazzling turf inclosed the bright blue water, and clumps of oak, ash, and linden, in park-like groups, studded the fields.
Mr. Taylor's muse has of late become very still-faced, decorous and mindful of the art-proprieties. Cautious is she, and there is perhaps nothing in this pastoral that will cause the grammarian to wince, or make the censorious rhetorician writhe in his judgment-seat with the sense that she is committing herself. Not such were the early attributes of the great itinerant's poetry. When he used to unsling his minstrel harp in the wilds of California or on the sunrise mountains of the Orient, there were plenty of false notes, plenty of youthful vivacities that overbore the strings and were heard as a sudden crack, and, withal, a good deal of young frank fire. Now there is much finish and the least possible suspicion of ennui. But the life-history of Lars is worth reading. It is a calm procession of pictures, without pretence, except the slight pretence of classical correctness. The first part, which reflects Norwegian manners in a way reminding us more or less of the exquisite stories of Bjornsen, tells how two swains of Ulvik, Lars the hunter and Per the fisher, quarrel for love of Brita, and at a public wrestling decide the question by a combat, fighting with knives, in Norse fashion, while hooked to each other at the belt. They strip,
Hence I shall not say how beautiful the bay of Ulvik was to me, since under other aspects the description would not be true. The farmer's little daughter, however, who came along to take back one of the horses, would have been a pleasant apparition at any time and in any season.
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