azzo Gratiosi, two thousand
feet above the sea. Thither he came, with his wife and his little son,
and there he fitted himself up a study; setting his writing table at a
window that overlooked an immensity of country, and Mont Soracte closing
the horizon with its fiery pyramid. In his correspondence of this time
there are suddenly noticeable a gayety and an insouciance which are
elements wholly new in his letters. The dreadful burden was lifted; the
dreadful fear of sinking in a sea of troubles and being lost for ever,
the fear which animates his painful letter to King Carl, was blown away
like a cloud and the heaven of his temper was serene. At Frascati he
knew not what to be at; he tried that subject, and this, waiting for the
heavenly spark to fall. It seems to have been at Tusculum, and in the
autumn of 1866, that the subject he was looking for descended upon him.
He hurried back to Rome, and putting all other schemes aside, he devoted
himself heart and soul to the composition of _Peer Gynt_, which he
described as to be "a long dramatic poem, having as its chief figure one
of the half-mythical and fantastical personages from the peasant life of
_modern_ Norway."

He wrote this work slowly, more slowly than was his wont, and it was
a whole year on the stocks. It was in the summer that Ibsen habitually
composed with the greatest ease, and _Peer Gynt_ did not trove smoothly
until the poet settled in the Villa Pisani, at Casamicciola, on the
island of Ischia. His own account was: "After _Brand_ came _Peer Gynt_,
as though of itself. It was written in Southern Italy, in Ischia and at
Sorrento. So far away from one's readers one becomes reckless. This poem
contains much that has its origin in the circumstances of my own youth.
My own mother--with the necessary exaggeration--served as the model for
Ase." _Peer Gynt_ was finished before Ibsen left Sorrento at the end of
the autumn, and the MS. was immediately posted to Copenhagen. None
of the delays which had interfered with the appearance of _Brand_ now
afflicted the temper of the poet, and _Peer Gynt_ was published in
November, 1867.

In spite of the plain speaking of Ibsen himself, who declared that _Peer
Gynt_ was diametrically opposed in spirit to _Brand_, and that it made
no direct attack upon social questions, the critics of the later
poem have too often persisted in darkening it with their educational
pedantries. Ibsen did well to be angry with his commentators. "T