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The first result of Heidenstam's long sojourn abroad was a volume of poems, Pilgrimage And Wander-Years ( Vallfart och Vandringsar ), published in 1888.

It was a brilliant debut, so much so indeed that it aroused a new vitality in the younger poets, as did Byron's Childe Harold.

Professor Fredrik Book, Sweden's foremost critic of the period, acclaims it as follows: `` In this we have the verse of a painter ; ;

strongly colorful, plastic, racy, vivid.

In a bold, sometimes careless, form there is nothing academic ; ;

all is seen and felt and experienced, the observation is sharp and the imagination lively.

The young poet-painter reproduces the French life of the streets ; ;

he tells stories of the Thousand and One Nights, and conjures up before us the bazaars of Damascus.

In the care-free indolence of the East he sees the last reflection of the old happy existence, and for that reason he loves it.

And yet amid all the gay hedonism in Pilgrimage And Wander-Years is a cycle of short poems, `` Thoughts In Loneliness '', filled with brooding, melancholy, and sombre longing ''.