,"

says Faust; and Jonas Lie's life and literary activity are apparently,
in a very real sense, the result of a similar warfare. There was,
indeed, a good ancestral reason for the duality of his nature. His
father, a judge of sterling ability and uprightness, was descended, but
a few generations back, from sturdy, blond, Norwegian peasants; while
his mother was of Finnish, or possibly Gypsy, descent. I remember well
this black-eyed, eccentric little lady, with her queer ways,
extraordinary costumes, and still more extraordinary conversation. It is
from her Jonas Lie has inherited the fantastic strain in his blood, the
strange, superstitious terrors, and the luxuriant wealth of color which
he lavished upon his poems and his first novel, "The Visionary." From
his paternal ancestors, who were for three generations judges and
judicial functionaries, he has derived his good sense, his intense
appreciation of detail, and his strong grip on reality. His career
represents at its two poles a progression from the adventurous
romanticism of his maternal heritage to the severe, wide-awake realism
of the paternal--the emancipation of the Norseman from the Finn.

"Jonas Lie has a good memory," writes his biographer. "Thus he
remembers--even though it be as through a haze--that he was once in the
world as the son of a laborer, a carpenter, or something in that line,
and that he went with food in a tin-pail to his father, when he was at
work. During this incarnation he must have behaved rather shabbily; for
in the next he found himself degraded to a fox--a silver fox--and in
this capacity he was shot one moonlight night on the snow. After that
he emerged, according to his recollection, as Jonas Lauritz Idemil, son
of the lawyer Mons Lie, at Hougsund, in Eker. This took place November
6, 1833."

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. Ther