The World's Great Masterpieces

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN. Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, a popular American novelist; born at Frederiksvarn, Norway, Sept. 23,1848; died in New York, Oct. 4,1895. After completing his university studies at Christiania, he came to the United States in 1869 and was editor of a Norwegian journal in Chicago. He returned to Europe in 1872 and studied Germanic philology at Leipsic two years; then returning to this country he was professor of German in Cornell University for six years, and then of Germanic languages and literature in Columbia College till his death. His story of Norwegian life, Gunnar, published in the Atlantic Monthly (1873), and his Idyls of Norway and Other Poems (1883), give proof of his rare imaginative faculty and his deep human sympathies. Besides these, he wrote: Tales from Two Hemispheres (1875); A Norseman's Pilgrimage; Ilka on the Hilltop and Other Stories; A Daughter of the Philistines.' The Hero In Fiction. (From Literary and Social Silhouettes.) Sometimes a nightmarish sensation comes over me that I am living somebody else's life ? that I am repeating with a helpless, hideous regularity the thoughts and deeds, the blunders and successes, of some creature that lived ages ago. If heroes of fiction were endowed with the power of sensation, they would, no doubt, be oppressed with a similar consciousness of preexistence. For most of them have not only their prototypes, but their exact counterparts, in the ages of the past. Environments may change, and are continually changing; and a certain modification in the hero's external guise and speech and sentiment may be the result of what we call modern improvement. But in their innermost core the characters remain essentially the same. The fundamental traits of human nature, transmitted b...