to heal but to slay; he exposes the corpse of an exhausted age, and will bury it quickly, with sexton’s songs and peals of elfin laughter, in some chasm of rock above a waterfall. “It is Will alone that matters,” and for the weak of purpose there is nothing but ridicule and six feet of such waste earth as nature carelessly can spare from her rude store of graves. Against the mountain landscape, Brand holds up his motto “All or Nothing,” persistently, almost tiresomely, like a modern advertising agent affronting the scenery with his panacea. More truculently still, he insists upon the worship of a deity, not white-bearded, but as young as Hercules, a scandal to prudent Lutheran theologians, a prototype of violent strength.
Yet Brand’s own mission remains undefined to him—if it ever takes exact shape—until Agnes reveals it to him:—
Choose thy endless loss or gain!
Do thy work and bear thy pain.…
Now (he answers) I see my way aright.
In ourselves is that young Earth,
Ripe for the divine new-birth.
And it is in Agnes—as the marvellous fourth act opens where her love for the little dear dead child is revealed, and where her patience endures all the
