over
a wide space of ground, and with no building of pretension except Fort
Dearborn, a stockade fortification.

Our artist returned to Europe in 1846, and for five years led a
wandering life of concert-giving in England, France, Holland, Germany,
Italy, and Spain, adding to his laurels by the recognition everywhere
conceded of the increased soundness and musicianly excellence of his
playing. It was indeed at this period that Ole Bull attained his best as
a virtuoso. He had been previously seduced by the example of Paganini,
and in the attempt to master the more strange and remote difficulties of
the instrument had often laid himself open to serious criticism. But Ole
Bull gradually formed a style of his own which was the outcome of his
passion for descriptive and poetic playing, and the correlative of the
mode of composition which he adopted. In still later years Ole Bull
seems to have returned again to what might be termed claptrap and
trickery in his art, and to have desired rather to excite wonder and
curiosity than to charm the sensibilities or to satisfy the requirements
of sound musical taste.

In 1851 Ole Bull returned home with the patriotic purpose of
establishing a strictly national theatre. This had been for a long time
one of the many dreams which his active imagination had conjured up as
a part of his mission. He was one of the earliest of that school of
reformers, of whom we have heard so much of late years, that urge the
readoption of the old Norse language--or, what is nearest to it now,
the Icelandic--as the vehicle of art and literature. In the attempt to
dethrone Dansk from its preeminence as the language of the drama, Ole
Bull signally failed, and his Norwegian theatre, established at Bergen,
proved only an insatiable tax on money-resources earned in other
directions.

The year succeeding this, Ole Bull again visited the United States,
and spent five years here. The return to America did not altogether
contemplate the pursuit of music, for there had been for a good while
boiling in his brain, among other schemes, the project of a great
Scandinavian colony, to be established in Pennsylvania under his
auspices. He purchased one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of
land on the Susquehanna, and hundreds of sturdy Norwegians flocked over
to the land of milk and honey thus auspiciously opened to them. Timber
was felled, ground cleared, churches, cottages, school-houses built,
and everything was p