c" poem; although a sketch for the _Julianus Apostata_ was
already forming in the back of his head, as a subject which would,
sooner or later, demand poetic treatment. He had left his wife and
little son in Copenhagen, but at the beginning of October they joined
him in Rome. The family lived on an income which seems almost incredibly
small, a maximum of 40 scudi a month. But it was a different thing to be
hungry in Christiania and in Rome, and Ibsen makes no complaints. A sort
of blessed languor had fallen upon him after all his afflictions. He
would loll through half his days among the tombs on the Via Latina, or
would loiter for hours and hours along the Appian Way. It took him weeks
to summon energy to visit S. Pietro in Vincoli, although he knew that
Michelangelo's "Moses" was there, and though he was weary with longing
to see it. All the tense chords of Ibsen's nature were loosened. His
soul was recovering, through a long and blissful convalescence, from the
aching maladies of its youth.

He took some part in the society of those Scandinavian writers, painters
and sculptors who gathered in Rome through the years of their distress.
But only one of them attracted him strongly, the young Swedish lyrical
poet, Count Carl Snoilsky, then the hope and already even the glory of
his country. There was some quaint diversity between the rude and
gloomy Norwegian dramatist, already middle-aged, and the full-blooded,
sparkling Swedish diplomatist of twenty-three, rich, flattered, and
already as famous for his fashionable _bonnes fortunes_ as Byron. But
two things Snoilsky and Ibsen had in common, a passionate enthusiasm for
their art, and a rebellious attitude towards their immediate precursors
in it. Each, in his own way, was the leader of a new school. The
friendship of Ibsen and Snoilsky was a permanent condition for the rest
of their lives, for it was founded on a common basis.

A few years later the writer of these pages received an amusing
impression of Ibsen at this period from the Danish poet, Christian
Molbech, who was also in Rome in 1865 and onwards. Ibsen wandering
silently about the streets, his hands plunged far into the pockets of
his invariable jacket of faded velveteen, Ibsen killing conversation by
his sudden moody appearances at the Scandinavian Club, Ibsen shattering
the ideals of the painters and the enthusiasms of the antiquaries by
a running fire of sarcastic paradox, this is mainly what the somewhat
uns