broken, the voice of a minority appealing
frantically and for a moment against the overwhelming forces of a
respectable majority, but it came to him just at the moment when his
young spirit was prepared to receive it with faith and joy. The effect
on Ibsen's character was sudden and it was final:

Then he stood up, and trod to dust
Fear and desire, mistrust and trust,
And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet,
And bound for sandals on his feet
Knowledge and patience of what must
And what things maybe, in the heat
And cold of years that rot and rust
And alter; and his spirit's meat
Was freedom, and his staff was wrought
Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought.

We are not left to conjecture on the subject; in a document of extreme
interest, which seems somehow to have escaped the notice of his
commentators, the preface to the second (1876) edition of _Catilina_,
he has described what the influences were which roused him out of
the wretchedness of Grimstad; they were precisely the revolution of
February, the risings in Hungary, the first Schleswig war. He wrote a
series of sonnets, now apparently lost, to King Oscar, imploring him to
take up arms for the help of Denmark, and of nights, when all his duties
were over at last, and the shop shut up, he would creep to the garret
where he slept, and dream himself fighting at the centre of the world,
instead of lost on its extreme circumference. And here he began his
first drama, the opening lines of which,

"I must, I must; a voice is crying to me
From my soul's depth, and I will follow it,"

might be taken as the epigraph of Ibsen's whole life's work.

In one of his letters to Georg Brandes he has noted, with that
clairvoyance which marks some of his utterances about himself, the
"full-blooded egotism" which developed in him during his last year of
mental and moral starvation at Grimstad. Through the whole series of
his satiric dramas we see the little narrow-minded borough, with its
ridiculous officials, its pinched and hypocritical social order, its
intolerable laws and ordinances, modified here and there, expanded
sometimes, modernized and brought up to date, but always recurrent in
the poet's memory. To the last, the images and the rebellions which were
burned into his soul at Grimstad were presented over and over again to
his readers.

But the necessity of facing the examination at Christiania now presented
itself. He was so