respondence of this time there are suddenly noticeable a gayety and an insouciance which are elements wholly new in his letters. The dreadful burden was lifted; the dreadful fear of sinking in a sea of troubles and being lost for ever, the fear which animates his painful letter to King Carl, was blown away like a cloud and the heaven of his temper was serene. At Frascati he knew not what to be at; he tried that subject, and this, waiting for the heavenly spark to fall. It seems to have been at Tusculum, and in the autumn of 1866, that the subject he was looking for descended upon him. He hurried back to Rome, and putting all other schemes aside, he devoted himself heart and soul to the composition of Peer Gynt, which he described as to be “a long dramatic poem, having as its chief figure one of the half-mythical and fantastical personages from the peasant life of modern Norway.”
He wrote this work slowly, more slowly than was his wont, and it was a whole year on the stocks. It was in the summer that Ibsen habitually composed with the greatest ease, and Peer Gynt did not move smoothly until the poet settled in the Villa Pisani, at Casamicciola, on the island of Ischia. His own account was: “After Brand came Peer Gynt, as though of itself. It was written in Southern-Italy, in Ischia and at Sor-
