We regret to announce the death of Henrik Ibsen, which took place at Christiana yesterday afternoon.
Henrik Ibsen was born at the little town of Skien, in South Norway, on March 20, 1828. His father, Knud Henriksen Ibsen, belonged to a Bergen family of sea-captains and merchants distinguished for several generations by energy and enterprise.
His mother, Cornelia Martine Altenburg, was the daughter of a substantial merchant of Skien. The house in which he was born was destroyed in the great fire at Skien in 1886. It stood prominently in the market-place, face to face with the town hall, the church, the schools, the prison, the madhouse, and other visible symbols of that State-power of which the future poet was so cordially to detest.
But the roar of two neighbouring cataracts and the strident wail of the scores of sawmills they drove filled the air all day, begetting characteristically sombre fancies in the boy╒s mind. ╥When, at a later day,╙ he tells us, ╥I read of the guillotine, I could not help thinking of those sawmills.╙
Isolated as he seemed, his mind was yet in more vital touch than that of anyone else in Europe with the mind of this generation. Others have photographed reality with a more obvious fidelity, have created more amusing and agreeable characters, and had a more clear-cut philosophy to put in their mouths; Ibsen appalled us with sudden glimpses into the abysses of human nature at once unlike our experience and yet shooting across it vistas of interpreting and revealing light.
Let it be added, strange as the tribute may sound to some who have not read him, that, having often to do with repugnant aspects of human nature, he ╥uttered nothing base,╙ and that, with many temptations to subserviency, he, like Hazlitt, wrote ╥not a line that licks the dust.╙
