Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 9).djvu/25

 THE LADY FROM THE SEA

INTRODUCTION

Ibsen's birth-place, Skien, is not on the sea, but at the head of a long and very narrow fiord. At Grimstad, however, and again at Bergen, he had for years lived close to the skerry-bound coast. After he left Bergen, he seldom came in touch with the open sea. The upper part of Christiania Fiord is a mere salt-water lake; and in Germany he never saw the sea, in Italy only on brief visits to Ischia, Sorrento, Amalfi. We find him, in 1880,[1] writing to Hegel from Munich: "Of all that I miss down here, I miss the sea most. That is the deprivation to which I can least reconcile myself.' Again, in 1885, before the visit which he paid that year to Norway, he writes from Rome to the same correspondent, that he has visions of buying a country-*house by the sea, in the neighbourhood of Christiania. "The sight of the sea," he says, "is what I most miss in these regions; and this feeling grows year by year." During the weeks he spent at Molde that year, there

1 The date is July 16. On March 5 of the same year he had (as we shall see later) written down the first outline of what was afterwards to become The Lady from the Sea.