n of his gifts was
at length made by the Government in the shape of another trifling
travelling grant (March, 1863), again a handsome sum being awarded to
Bjoernson, his popular rival. In May Ibsen applied, in despair, to the
King himself, who conferred upon him a small pension of L90 a year,
which for the immediate future stood between this great poet and
starvation. The news of it was received in Christiania by the press in
terms of despicable insult.

But in June of this _annee terrible_ Ibsen had a flash of happiness.
He was invited down to Bergen to the fifth great "Festival of Song,"
a national occurrence, and he and his poems met with a warm reception.
Moreover, he found his brilliant antagonist, Bjoernson, at Bergen on a
like errand, and renewed an old friendship with this warm-hearted and
powerful man of genius, destined to play through life the part of Hakon
to Ibsen's Skule. They spent much of the subsequent winter together.
As Halvdan Koht has excellently said: "Their intercourse brought them
closer to each other than they had ever been before. They felt that they
were inspired by the same ideas and the same hopes, and they suffered
the same bitter disappointments. With anguish they watched the Danish
brother-nation's desperate struggle against the superior power of
Germany, and save a province with a population of Scandinavian race and
speech taken from Denmark and incorporated in a foreign kingdom,
whilst the Norwegian and Swedish kinsmen, in spite of solemn promises,
refrained from yielding any assistance." An attack on Holstein (December
22, 1863) had introduced the Second Danish War, to which a disastrous
and humiliating termination was brought in the following August.

In April, 1864, Ibsen took the momentous step of quitting his native
country. He entered Copenhagen at the dark hour when Schleswig as well
as Holstein had been abandoned, and when the citadel of Duepper alone
stood between Denmark and ruin. His agonized sympathy may be read in the
indignant lyrics of that spring. A fortnight later he set out, by Luebeck
and Trieste, for Rome, where he had now determined to reside. He reached
that city in due time, and sank with ineffable satisfaction into the
arms of its antique repose. "Here at last," he wrote to Bjoernson,
"there is blessed peace," and he settled himself down to the close
contemplation of poetry.

The change from the severities of an interminable Northern winter to
the glow and spl