ing months of
the period. Ten years before the birth of Ibsen of the greatest poets of
Europe had written words which seem meant to characterize an adolescence
such as his. "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature
imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between,
in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of
life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted; thence proceed mawkishness
and a thousand bitters."

It is easy to discover that Ibsen, from his sixth to his twentieth
year, suffered acutely from moral and intellectual distemper. He was at
war--the phrase is his own--with the little community in which he lived.
And yet it seems to have been, in its tiny way, a tolerant and even
friendly little community. It is difficult for us to realize what life
in a remote coast-town of Norway would be sixty years ago. Connection
with the capital would be rare and difficult, and, when achieved, the
capital was as yet little more than we should call a village. There
would, perhaps, be a higher uniformity of education among the best
inhabitants of Grimstad than we are prepared to suppose. A certain
graceful veneer of culture, an old-fashioned Danish elegance reflected
from Copenhagen, would mark the more conservative citizens, male and
female. A fierier generation--not hot enough, however, to set the
fjord on flame--would celebrate the comparatively recent freedom of the
country in numerous patriotic forms. It is probable that a dark boy like
Ibsen would, on the whole, prefer the former type, but he would despise
them both.

He was poor, excruciatingly poor, with a poverty that excluded all
indulgence, beyond the bare necessities, in food and clothes and
books. We can conceive the meagre advance of his position, first a
mere apprentice, then an assistant, finally buoyed up by the advice
of friends to study medicine and pharmacy, in the hope of being, some
bright day, himself no less than the owner of a drug-store. Did Mr.
Anstey know this, or was it the sheer adventure of genius, when he
contrasted the qualities of the master into "Pill-Doctor Herdal,"
compounding "beautiful rainbow-colored powders that will give one a real
grip on the world"? Ibsen, it is allowable to think, may sometimes have
dreamed of a pill, "with arsenic in it, Hilda, and digitalis, too,
and strychnine and the best beetle-killer," which would decimate the
admirable inhabitants of Grimstad, strewing the r