one-room; or Akershus fortress, when the
thundering cannon announce the king's arrival, and the air is filled
with martial music and mighty royal commands; when I think how I
pictured to myself "the high hall of light," the University, as a great
white chalk mountain, always with the sunshine on its windowpanes; or
how I imagined the Storthing [Norwegian parliament] Hall, and the men
who frequent it, whose names, magnified by fancy, echoed up to us, as
though for each one there rang through the air a mighty resounding bell,
names like Foss, Soerenssen, Jonas Anton Hjelm, Schweigaard, and many
others; when I compare what I, up in the north, imagined about all this,
with the "for our small conditions--most respectable reality," in which
I now live and move--it is like a card-castle of illusions, as high as
Snehaetten, [Snehaetten--a mountain in the Dovre range, 7400 feet high.]
falling over me. Until I was over twenty years of age, I lived only in a
northern fairyland, and I am now for the first time born into the world
of reality: I have been spell-bound in my own fancy.

If I were to tell any one all this, he would certainly--and the more
sensible the man was the more surely--be of opinion that my good Examen
Artium [Artium--an examination to be passed before admittance to the
University is granted.] must clearly have come about by some mistake.
But if life depends on theoretical reasoning and knowledge, I have,
thank God, as good abilities as most men. And I know that in them I have
a pair of pliant oars, with which, as long as I require to do so, I
shall be able to row my boat through practical life without running
aground. The load which I have in the boat, at times so very heavy, but
then again so blissfully beautiful, no one shall see.

I feel a longing to weep away the whole of this northern fairy tale of
mine, and would do it if I could only weep away my life with it. But
why wish to lose all the loveliness, all the illusion, when I must still
bear with me to my dying day the sadness it has laid upon me?

It will be a relief to me in quiet hours to put down my recollections of
this home of mine, which so few down here understand. It is the tale of
a poor mentally-diseased man, and in it there are more of his own
impressions than of outward events.

* * * * *

PART III

* * * * *

CHAPTER I

_HOME_

My father