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 cruelties of her husband's fanaticism--it is in Agnes
that Ibsen's genius for the first time utters the clear, unembittered
note of full humanity. He has ceased now to be parochial; he is a
nursling of the World and Time. If the harsh Priest be, in a measure,
Ibsen as Norway made him, Agnes and Einar, and perhaps Gerd also, are
the delicate offspring of Italy.
Considerable postponements delayed the publication of _Brand_, which saw
the light at length, in Copenhagen, in March, 1866. It was at once
welcomed by the Danish press, which had hitherto known little of Ibsen,
and the poet's audience was thus very considerably widened.
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