"But even though the overwhelming might of nature bears down with oppressive weight on everything living along that dark, wintry, frothing coast, where nine months of the year are a constant twilight and three of these are without even a glimpse of the sun, so that people's minds become filled with fear of the dark, yet Nordland also possesses the opposite extreme in its sun-warmed, clear-skied, scent-filled summers with their endless play of infinitely varied colors and tints, when distances of seventy or eighty miles seem to melt away so that we can shout across them, when the mountain clothes itself in brownish green grass to the very top--in Lofoten to a height of two thousand feet--and the slender birch trees wreathe the tops of the hills and the edges of the mountain clefts like a dance of sixteen-year-old white-clad girls, while the fragrance of strawberries and raspberries rises to you through the warm air as you pass in your shirt sleeves, and the day is so hot that you long to bathe in the sun-filled, rippling sea which is clear to the very bottom.
"The learned say that the intensities of color and fragrance in the far North are due to the power of the light which fills the air when the sun shines without interruption day and night. Therefore one can not pick so aromatic strawberries and raspberries or so fragrant birch boughs in any other clime. If a fairy idyl has any home, it is certainly in the deep fjord valleys of Nordland in the summer. It is as though the sun were kissing nature so much more tenderly because they have such a short time to be together and must soon part again."
Jonas Lie's description, which I have taken the liberty to quote in abbreviated form, gives a picture of the surroundings in which Hamsun spent his boyhood. It would have been impossible to find any spot in the world more suited to nourish the fancy of an imaginative, impressionable boy. Lonely as he was, he had little to interest him or occupy his mind except what he could find for himself out of doors. He was put to work herding cattle, and spent long dreamy hours alone revelling in the loveliness of the light Nordland summer. It was then he laid the foundation for his habit of roaming alone in the woods and fields, and there he gained that intimate, tender knowledge of nature which appears in his works. In telling of his childhood, Hamsun says that the animals and birds became his friends. He speaks also of the deep impression which the sea made upon him. His uncle's house, where he spent some of his boyhood, was built above the ocean stream, Glimma, which rushed over a rocky bottom, sometimes one way, sometimes another, according to the tide, but always in motion. Beyond it lay the open sea.