ocks with their bodies
in their go-to-meeting coats and dresses. He had in him that source of
anger, against which all arguments are useless, which bubbles up in the
heart of youth who vaguely feels himself possessed of native energy, and
knows not how to stir a hand or even formulate a wish. He was savage in
manners, unprepossessing in appearance, and, as he himself has told us
with pathetic naivete, unable to express the real gratitude he felt to
the few who would willingly have extended friendship to him if he had
permitted it.

As he advanced in age, he does not seem to have progressed in grace. By
the respectable citizens of Grimstad--and even Grimstad had its little
inner circle of impenetrable aristocracy--he regarded as "not quite
nice." The apothecary's assistant was a bold young man, who did not
seem to realize his menial position. He was certainly intelligent, and
Grimstad would have overlooked the pills and ointments if his manners
had been engaging, but he was rude, truculent and contradictory. The
youthful female sex is not in the habit of sharing the prejudices of
its elders in this respect, and many a juvenile Orson has, in such
conditions, enjoyed substantial successes. But young Ibsen was not a
favorite even with the girls, whom he alarmed and disconcerted. One of
the young ladies of Grimstad in after years attempted to describe the
effect which the poet made upon them. They had none of them liked him,
she said, "because"--she hesitated for the word--"because he was so
_spectral_." This gives us just the flash we want; it reveals to us for
a moment the distempered youth, almost incorporeal, displayed wandering
about at twilight and in lonely places, held in common esteem to be
malevolent, and expressing by gestures rather than by words sentiments
of a nature far from complimentary or agreeable.

Thus life at Grimstad seems to have proceeded until Ibsen reached his
twenty-first year. In this quiet backwater of a seaport village the
passage of time was deliberate, and the development of hard-worked
apothecaries was slow. Ibsen's nature was not in any sense precocious,
and even if he had not languished in so lost a corner of society, it is
unlikely that he would have started prematurely in life or literature.
The actual waking up, when it came at last, seems to have been almost an
accident. There had been some composing of verses, now happily lost, and
some more significant distribution of "epigrams" and