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NOTES ae
ideal. His wife died on January 28, 1870.On a walk the next day he sud-
denly was seized with intense pains, had to go home and to bed, and
died on February 1. An autopsy showed that his heart was ruptured.
Their joint funeral was held on February 5.
Page 144.
To AasMuND OLAFSEN VINJE. Vinje, the son of a poor cottager, was
born on a farm in Telemarken, April 6, 1818, and died July 30, 1870.
Poverty and his peculiar personality made life hard for him from first
to last. Bent on testing all things for himself, he came into conflict
with the authorities. He was discharged from a school in Mandal in
1848 because of his scoffing criticism of a religious schoolbook. He
went then to Heltberg’s School (see page 252) in Christiania, soon after
became a student in the University, and passed the state examination
in law in 1856. But his life was devoted to literary pursuits, and he
was most gifted as a lyric poet. In 1858 Vinje went over completely
to the Landsmaal (see page 264), and in this form of dialect found his
natural medium of expression. In October of the same year he began
his weekly paper, Dolen, in which he treated all the current interests.
Although one of the most advanced thinkers and keenest combatants
in his country’s spiritual conflicts, he stood very much alone, a great
skeptic and satirist, who practiced irony with the highest art. Vinje
had no home of his own until after his marriage on June 20, 1869.
His wife died immediately after the birth of a son, on April 12, 1870,
At her burial on April 16 Bjornson was present, and taking Vinje’s
hand ended an estrangement which had existed for some years because
of Vinje’s unjustly harsh criticism of Bjérnson’s early peasant tales,
and other rather personal attacks.
Guests, the angel of life and the angel of death.
You stand sick, with the incurable disease which caused his death a
few months later.
Great and wondrous visions, probably (cf. also the following stanza)
of the truth of the orthodox faith, which Bjérnson at the time still firmly
held.
Page 146.
Goop CuErr. This poem stood last in the first edition, with the title
“Last Song.” It is a vigorous, partly humorous, beautiful, true self-
characterization of Bjérnson’s position in the life of Christiania and
Norway just prior to 1870, and a statement of his ideals and models
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