door, when it opened, and in glided an undersized man with
very broad shoulders and a large, leonine head, wearing a long black
frock-coat with very broad lapels, on one of which a knot of red ribbon
was conspicuous. I knew him at once, but was a little taken aback by his
low stature. In spite of all the famous instances to the contrary, one
instinctively associates greatness with size. His natural height was
even somewhat diminished by a habit of bending forward slightly from the
waist, begotten, no doubt, of short-sightedness, and the need to peer
into things. He moved very slowly and noiselessly, with his hands
behind his back--an unobtrusive personality, which would have been
insignificant had the head been strictly proportionate to the rest
of the frame. But there was nothing insignificant about the high and
massive forehead, crowned with a mane of (then) iron-gray hair, the
small and pale but piercing eyes behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, or
the thin lipped mouth, depressed at the corners into a curve indicative
of iron will, and set between bushy whiskers of the same dark gray as
the hair. The most cursory observer could not but recognize power and
character in the head; yet one would scarcely have guessed it to be the
power of a poet, the character of a prophet. Misled, perhaps, by the
ribbon at the buttonhole, and by an expression of reserve, almost of
secretiveness, in the lines of the tight-shut mouth, one would rather
have supposed one's self face to face with an eminent statesman or
diplomatist.

With the further advance of years all that was singular in Ibsen's
appearance became accentuated. The hair and beard turned snowy white;
the former rose in a fierce sort of Oberland, the latter was kept square
and full, crossing underneath the truculent chin that escaped from it.
As Ibsen walked to a banquet in Christiania, he looked quite small
under the blaze of crosses, stars and belts which he displayed when he
unbuttoned the long black overcoat which enclosed him tightly. Never
was he seen without his hands behind him, and the poet Holger Drachmann
started a theory that as Ibsen could do nothing in the world but write,
the Muse tied his wrists together at the small of his back whenever they
were not actually engaged in composition. His regularity in all habits,
his mechanical ways, were the subject of much amusement. He must sit day
after day in the same chair, at the same table, in the same corner
of the c