of a very great man is influenced by his surroundings, and by his
physical condition in those surroundings, it was the atmosphere of
Grimstad and of its drug-store which moulded the character of Ibsen.
Skien and his father's house dropped from him like an old suit of
clothes. He left his parents, whom he scarcely knew, the town which he
hated, the schoolmates and schoolmasters to whom he seemed a surly
dunce. We find him next, with an apron round his middle and a pestle in
his hand, pounding drugs in a little apothecary's shop in Grimstad. What
Blackwood's so basely insinuated of Keats--"Back to the shop, Mr. John,
stick to plasters, pills and ointment-boxes," inappropriate to the
author of _Endymion_, was strictly true of the author of _Peer Gynt_.

Curiosity and hero-worship once took the author of these lines to
Grimstad. It is a marvellous object-lesson on the development of genius.
For nearly six years (from 1844 to 1850), and those years the most
important of all in the moulding of character and talent, one of the
most original and far-reaching imaginations which Europe has seen for a
century was cooped up here among ointment-boxes, pills and plasters.
Grimstad is a small, isolated, melancholy place, connected with nothing
at all, visitable only by steamer. Featureless hills surround it, and it
looks out into the east wind, over a dark bay dotted with naked rocks.
No industry, no objects of interest in the vicinity, a perfect
uniformity of little red houses where nobody seems to be doing anything;
in Ibsen's time there are said to have been about five hundred of these
apathetic inhabitants. Here, then, for six interminable years, one of
the acutest brains in Europe had to interest itself in fraying
ipecacuanha and mixing black draughts behind an apothecary's counter.

For several years nothing is recorded, and there was probably very
little that demanded record, of Ibsen's life at Grimstad. His own