endor of Italy acted on the poet's spirit like an
enchantment. Ibsen came, another Pilgrim of Eternity, to Rome's "azure
sky, flowers, ruins, statues, music," and at first the contrast
between the crudity he had left and the glory he had found was almost
intolerable. He could not work; all he did was to lie in the flushed air
and become as a little child. There has scarcely been another example
of a writer of the first class who, deeply solicitous about beauty, but
debarred from all enjoyment of it until his thirty-seventh year, has
been suddenly dipped, as if into a magic fountain, into the heart of
unclouded loveliness without transition or preparation. Shelley and
Keats were dead long before they reached the age at which Ibsen broke
free from his prison-house of ice, while Byron, in the same year of his
life, was closing his romantic career.

Ibsen's earliest impressions of what these poets had become accustomed
to at a ductile age were contradictory and even incoherent. The passion
of pagan antiquity for a long while bewildered him. He wandered among
the vestiges of antique art, unable to perceive their relation to modern
life, or their original significance. He missed the impress of the
individual on classic sculpture, as he had missed it--the parallel is
strange, but his own--on the Eddaic poems of ancient Iceland. He liked
a lyric or a statue to speak to him of the man who made it. He felt more
at home with Bernini among sculptors and with Bramante among architects
than with artists of a more archaic type. Shelley, we may remember,
labored under a similar heresy; to each of these poets the
attractiveness of individual character overpowered the languid flavor
of the age in which the artist had flourished. Ibsen's admiration of a
certain overpraised monument of Italian architecture would not be worth
recording but for the odd vigor with which he adds that the man who made
that might have made the moon in his leisure moments.

During the first few months of Ibsen's life in Rome all was chaos in
his mind. He was plunged in stupefaction at the beauties of nature, the
amenities of mankind, the interpenetration of such a life with such an
art as he had never dreamed of and could yet but dimly comprehend.
In September, 1864, he tells Bjoernson that he is at work on a poem of
considerable length. This must have been the first draft of _Brand_,
which was begun, we know, as a narrative, or as the Northerns call
it, an "epi