The name of Henrik Ibsen has now become so familiar to the English public it it seems almost needless to remind the reader of the incidents of his life. I may, however, be permitted to repeat once more iat the most illustrious Scandinavian writer our age was born in the little timber-port Skien, in Norway, on the 20th of March, 1828. His parents were Norwegian by citizenship, but of a stock in which Danish, German, and Scotch elements were curiously tingled. Like Keats, he was brought up to busy himself among "plasters, pills, and ointment boxes," but soon threw off this bondage the apothecary. In 1850 he published a stiff historical tragedy of "Catalina." From this he rose, slowly but steadily, to poetical work more characteristic of himself. He developed an extraordinary gift in lyrical drama, a power over rhyming dialogue not easily to be matched in the literature of any country. His plays in rhyme, as musical as is Apollo's lute, enjoyed a great and deserved popularity. In "Love's Comedy," 1863, in "Brand," 1865, in "PeerGynt," 1867, he produced dramatic poems of infinite wit and vivacity, on the adornment of which he had expended all the treasures of metrical art. To the dismay of his admirers, he forthwith rejected rhyme and metre altogether.It is not necessary to tell the story in detail. It is part of Ibsen's magnificent genius for stage arrangement that the plots of his plays unwind themselves without a hitch in their natural evolution. The attention is arrested at once; no more is educed than the memory needs to retain, and the tension of excitement becomes steadily greater to the close. He who has the play before him holds a better thread of the plot than I can give. But it may be briefly said that Dr. Wangel, the town physician, after a common-place happy marriage, in which two daughters were born to him, has lost his wife. As his mother less daughters grow up, he determines, for their sakes, as much as for his own, that he will marry again. During a professional excursion to the lighthouse on the outer skerry, he falls in love with Ellida, the beautiful solitary daughter of the lighthouse keeper. She is quite young, scarcely older than his elder child, Bolette. Ellida accepts him, after having frankly told him that he is not her first fancy, although she now is free. They marry, and they are happy; but Ellida shows herself to be psychically abnormal. She is like the girl in Sir Walter Scott's letter; she cannot breathe in the town to which she has been transplanted; she pines after the motion and variety of the sea, and in the absence of this brilliant sedative with which she has been wont to calm her nerves, her mental disease rows upon her, and she becomes a neurotic invalid. Gentle and unselfish, and mated to wise and tender man, she is yet melancholy, restless, irritable, and unfitted to fulfil the duties or enjoy the pleasures of her position. The step-daughters are unable to win her sympathy, and they fall away from her j her only child has died, and since that time, in her growing melancholia, she has evaded her husband also. Her only enjoyment is bathing; her only perfectly lucid intervals are those which she spends upon the ocean. Her husband makes her only worse by injudicious doses of morphia. Such is the condition of the principal characters when the play opens.The Lady from the Sea by Henrik Ibsen. Norwegian Theatrical drama. Contains a Critical Introduction by Edmund Gosse.