He painted a more
agreeable Ibsen when he spoke of his summer flights to the Alban Hills,
planned on terms of the most prudent reference to resources which seemed
ever to be expected and never to arrive. Nevertheless, under the vines
in front of some inn at Genzano or Albano, Ibsen would duly be
discovered, placid and dreamy, always self-sufficient and self-
contained, but not unwilling to exchange, over a flask of thin wine,
commonplaces with a Danish friend. It was at Ariccia, in one of these
periods of _villegiatura_, during the summer and autumn of 1865, that
_Brand_, which had long been under considerature, suddenly took final
shape, and was written throughout, without pause or hesitation. In July
the poet put everything else aside to begin it, and before the end of
September he had completed it.
_Brand_ placed Ibsen at a bound among the greatest European poets of his
age. The advance over the sculptural perfection of _The Pretenders_ and
the graceful wit of _Love's Comedy_ was so great as to be startling.
Nothing but the veil of a foreign language, which the best translations
are powerless to tear away from noble verse, prevented this mastery from
being perceived at once.
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