ympathetic Molbech was not unwilling to reproduce. He painted a more
agreeable Ibsen when he spoke of his summer flights to the Alban Hills,
planned on terms of the most prudent reference to resources which seemed
ever to be expected and never to arrive. Nevertheless, under the
vines in front of some inn at Genzano or Albano, Ibsen would duly
be discovered, placid and dreamy, always self-sufficient and
self-contained, but not unwilling to exchange, over a flask of thin
wine, commonplaces with a Danish friend. It was at Ariccia, in one of
these periods of _villegiatura_, during the summer and autumn of 1865,
that _Brand_, which had long been under considerature, suddenly took
final shape, and was written throughout, without pause or hesitation. In
July the poet put everything else aside to begin it, and before the end
of September he had completed it.

_Brand_ placed Ibsen at a bound among the greatest European poets of his
age. The advance over the sculptural perfection of _The Pretenders_ and
the graceful wit of _Love's Comedy_ was so great as to be startling.
Nothing but the veil of a foreign language, which the best translations
are powerless to tear away from noble verse, prevented this mastery from
being perceived at once. In Scandinavia, where that veil did not exist,
for those who had eyes to see, and who were not blinded by prejudice,
it was plain that a very great writer had arisen in Norway at last.
Bjoernson had seemed to slip ahead of Ibsen; his _Sigurd Slembe_ (1862)
was a riper work than the elder friend had produced; but _Mary Stuart in
Scotland_ (1864) had marked a step backward, and now Ibsen had once
more shot far ahead of his rival. When we have admitted some want of
clearness in the symbolism which runs through _Brand_, and some
shifting of the point of view in the two last acts, an incoherency and
a turbidity which are natural in the treatment of so colossal a theme,
there is very little but praise to be given to a poem which is as
manifold in its emotion and as melodious in its versification as it
is surprising in its unchallenged originality. In the literatures of
Scandinavia it has not merely been unsurpassed, but in its own peculiar
province it has not been approached. It bears some remote likeness
to _Faust_, but with that exception there is perhaps nothing in the
literature of the world which can be likened to _Brand_, except, of
course, _Peer Gynt_.

For a long while it was supposed that the