prepared a revised version of The Warrior's Barrow, already produced in Christiania. A year later, January 2, 1855, Lady Inger of Östråt was produced—a work still immature, indeed, but giving, for the first time, no uncertain promise of the master dramatist to come.
In an autobiographical letter to the Danish critic Peter Hansen, written from Dresden in 1870, Ibsen says: "Lady Inger of Östråt is the result of a love-affair—hastily entered into and violently broken off—to which several of my minor poems may also be attributed, such as Wild-flowers and Pot-plants, A Bird-Song, &c." The heroine of this love-affair can now be identified as a lady named Henrikke Holst, who seems to have preserved through a long life the fresh, bright spirit, the overflowing joyousness, which attracted Ibsen when she was only in her seventeenth year. Their relation was of the most innocent. It went no further than a few surreptitious rambles in the romantic surroundings of Bergen, usually with a somewhat older girl to play propriety, and with a bag of sugar-plums to fill up pauses in the conversation. The "violent" ending seems to have come when the young lady's father discovered the secret of these excursions, and doubtless placed her under more careful control. What there was in this episode to suggest, or in any way influence, Lady Inger, I cannot understand. Nevertheless the identification seems quite certain. The affair had a charming little sequel. During the days of their love's young dream, Ibsen treated the "wild-flower" with a sort of shy and distant chivalry at which the wood-gods must have smiled. He avoided even touching her hand, and always addressed her by the "De" (you) of formal
