fools of fancy, passionately weaving the cords that are to strangle
passion. Comedy like this cannot be altogether gay; and as each
fresh romance decays into routine, and each aspiring passion goes
out under the spell of a vulgar environment, or submits to the
bitter salvation of a final parting, the ringing laughter grows
harsh and hollow, and notes of ineffable sadness escape from the
poet's Stoic self-restraint.

Ibsen had grown up in a school which cultivated the romantic,
piquant, picturesque in style; which ran riot in wit, in vivacious
and brilliant imagery, in resonant rhythms and telling double
rhymes. It must be owned that this was not the happiest school
for a dramatist, nor can _Love's Comedy_ be regarded, in the
matter of style, as other than a risky experiment which nothing
but the sheer dramatic force of an Ibsen could have carried through.
As it is, there are palpable fluctuations, discrepancies of manner;
the realism of treatment often provokes a realism of style out of
keeping with the lyric afflatus of the verse; and we pass with
little warning from the barest colloquial prose to the strains
of high-wrought poetic fancy. Nevertheless, the style, with all
its inequalities, becomes in Ibsen's hands a singularly plastic
medium of dramatic expression. The marble is too richly veined
for ideal sculpture, but it takes the print of life. The wit,
exuberant as it is, does not coruscate indiscriminately upon all
lips; and it has many shades and varieties--caustic, ironical,
imaginative, playful, passionate--which take their temper from
the speaker's mood.

The present version of the play retains the metres of the original,
and follows it in general line for line. For a long passage,