e great prestige of Ibsen did not depend so much on the dramas he was
then producing, as on the earlier works of his poetic youth, now reread
with an unexampled fervor. So, with us, the tardy popularity of Robert
Browning, which faintly resembles that of Ibsen, did not attract the
younger generation to the volumes which succeed _The Ring and the Book_,
but sent them back to the books which their fathers had despised, to
_Pippa Passes_ and _Men and Women_. To the generation of 1880, Ibsen was
not so much the author of the realistic social dramas as of those old
but now rediscovered miracles of poetry and wit, _The Pretenders_,
_Brand_ and _Peer Gynt_.

In 1889 Ibsen had been made very pleasantly conscious of this strong
personal feeling in his favor among young men and women. Nor did he
find it confined to Scandinavia. He had travelled about in Germany, and
everywhere his plays were being acted. Berlin was wild about him; at
Weimar he was feted like a conqueror. He did not settle down at Munich
until May, and here, as we have seen, he stayed all the summer, hard at
work. After the success of _Hedda Gabler_, which overpowered all adverse
comment, Ibsen began to long to be in Norway again, and this feeling
was combined, in a curious way, with a very powerful emotion which now
entered into his life. He had lived a retired and peaceful existence,
mainly a spectator at the feast, as little occupied in helping himself
to the dishes which he saw others enjoy as is an eremite in the desert
in plucking the grape-clusters of his dreams. No adventure, of any
prominent kind, had ever been seen to diversify Ibsen's perfectly
decorous and domestic career. And now he was more than sixty, and the
gray tones were gathering round him more thickly than ever, when a real
ray of vermilion descended out of the sky and filled his horizon with
color.

In the season of 1889, among the summer boarders at Gossensass, there
appeared a young Viennese lady of eighteen, Miss Emilie Bardach. She
used to sit on a certain bench in the Pferchthal, and when the poet,
whom she adored from afar, passed by, she had the courage to smile at
him. Strange to say, her smile was returned, and soon Ibsen was on
the bench at her side. He readily discovered where she lived; no less
readily he gained an introduction to the family with whom she boarded.
There was a window-seat in the _salle a manger_; it was deep and shaded
by odorous flowering shrubs; it lent itself t