mblance between the old English and the modern Norwegian
dramatist is that each has felt the solid stuff of the drama to require
lightening, and has attempted to provide this by means, in Ben Jonson's
case, of solemn "choruses," in Ibsen's of lyrics. In the latter instance
the tragedy ends in rolling and rhymed verse, little suited to the
stage.

This is a very curious example, among many which might be brought
forward, of Ibsen's native partiality for dramatic rhyme. In all
his early plays, his tendency is to slip into the lyrical mood. This
tendency reached its height nearly twenty years later in _Brand_ and
_Peer Gynt_, and the truth about the austere prose which he then adopted
for his dramas is probably this, not that the lyrical faculty had
quitted him, but that he found it to be hampering his purely dramatic
expression, and that he determined, by a self-denying ordinance, to tear
it altogether off his shoulders, like an embroidered mantle, which is in
itself very ornamental, but which checks an actor's movements.

The close of Ibsen's _Catalina_ is, as we have said, composed entirely
in rhyme, and the effect of this curious. It is as though the young poet
could not restrain the rhythm bubbling up in him, and was obliged to
start running, although the moment was plainly one for walking. Here is
a fragment. Catiline has stabbed Aurelia, and left her in the tent for
dead. But while he was soliloquizing at the door of the tent, Fulvia
has stabbed him. He lies dying at the foot of a tree, and makes a speech
which ends thus:--

See, the pathway breaks, divided! I will wander, dumb, To the left hand.

AURELIA
(appearing, blood-stained, at the door of the tent).
Nay! the right hand! Towards Elysium.

CATILINE
(greatly alarmed).
O yon pallid apparition, how it fills me with remorse. 'Tis herself!
Aurelia! tell me, art thou living? not a corse?

AURELIA.
Yes, I live that I may full thy sea of sorrows, and may lie With my
bosom pressed a moment to thy bosom, and then die.

CATILINE
(bewildered).
What? thou livest?

AURELIA.

Death's pale herald o'er my senses threw a pall,
But my dulled eye tracked thy footsteps, and I saw, I saw it all,
And my passion a wife's forces to my wounded body gave;
Breast to breast, my Catiline, let us sink into o