_The Assumption of Hannele_, which appeared in 1893 and had a germ-idea not unlike that of _Before Dawn_, created sharp discussion in Germany. There was protest against its performance. The next year it was brought to the United States, to be staged at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York. It was translated into English by William Archer and by Charles Henry Meltzer. Reformers of many kinds denounced the play without a hearing. They threatened the author, who had come to this country to see the performance and to advise with his publisher, with arrest; the same fate was to fall upon the translator, Charles Henry Meltzer, and the actress who was to play the leading rôle. “Some representatives of the press, with critics and authors, were bidden to a private performance and the next day the newspapers, with a few impenitent exceptions, published eulogies of _Hannele_! No one was arrested. And the public performance took place.”[80] The American translator of both _The Assumption of Hannele_ and _The Sunken Bell_, Mr. Charles Henry Meltzer, has described Hauptmann at this period, in the Foreword to _The Sunken Bell_. He had expected to meet an aggressive, self-satisfied man. On the contrary, he found one who seemed like a student, with shy, boyish manners; he might have been classified as a curate or a teacher; “A painful, introspective, hunted earnestness was stamped upon his face--the face of a thinker, a dreamer, a genius” (Foreword). _Hannele_ was not a success theatrically in New York. _The Weavers_, at the Irving Place Theatre, attracted somewhat more attention but the time was too indifferent to such plays in America; one could not forecast the cordial reception for problem plays and grim tragedies, with mystic elements, three decades later. It was eighteen years before the Swedish Academy gave world recognition and honor to Hauptmann. A few men and women of literary insight--or foresight--proclaimed a future for the creator of such a “dream-poem” as _Hannele_. Gradually, readers became interested and stirred by this strange play based upon the weird apparitions of the fevered brain of the little waif, the poetic chorus of the angels, the comfort of her mother and Pastor Gottwald, in contrast with the terrifying fear of her father’s return, the stormy December evening in this mountain almshouse, and the poems of “The Stranger” which cast a spell of religious peace upon the reader, as the mystic, green light fell upon the face of dying Hannele. This “dream-poem,” as Hauptmann called it, won for him the Grillparzer prize in Germany. Two years later, after the failure of _Florian Geyer_ to win plaudits of dramatic critics, he wrote another play of symbolism and anapestic meters, combining the realities of life with mystic allurements, and he called it “A Fairy-Tale Play,” _Die versunkene Glocke_. His most severe critics were convinced of his lyrical quality and dramatic power.