In March, 1866, worn out with illness, poverty and suspense, he wrote a letter to Björnson, “my one and only friend,” which is one of the most heart-rending documents in the history of literature. Few great spirits have been nearer the extinction of despair than Ibsen was, now in his thirty-ninth year. His admirers, at their wits’ end to know what to advise, urged him to write directly to Carl, King of Sweden and Norway, describing his condition, and asking for support. Simultaneously came the manifest success of Brand, and, for the first time, the Norwegian press recognized the poet’s merit. There was a general movement in his favor; King Carl graciously received his petition of April 15, and on May 10 the Storthing, almost unanimously, voted Ibsen a “poet’s pension,” restricted in amount but sufficient for his modest needs.
The first use he made of his freedom was to move out of Rome, where he found it impossible to write, and to settle at Frascati among the hills. He hired a nest of cheap rooms in the Palazzo 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 Soracté closing the horizon with its fiery pyramid. In his cor-
