He followed it with a new Odyssey of his soul, the amazing Peer Gynt (1867), in which his humour, hitherto a latent quality, his fantasy, bold invention, and the poetic evocation of the faithful, exquisite Solveig, are further testimony to his breadth of resource. Peer Gynt is all that Brand was not: whimsical, worldly, fantastic, weak-willed, not so vicious as perverse; he is very selfish, one who was to himself sufficient, therefore a failure. The will, if it frees, may also kill. It killed the soul of Peer. There are pages of unflagging humour, poetry, and observation; scene dissolves into scene; Peer travels over half the earth, is rich, is successful, is poor; and at the end meets the Button-Moulder, that ironical shadow who tells him what he has become. We hear the Boyg, the spirit of compromise, with its huge, deadly, coiling lengths, gruffly bid Peer to "go around." Facts of life are to be slunk about, never to be faced. Peer comes to harbour in the arms of his deserted Solveig. The resounding sarcasm, the ferociousness of the attack on all the idols of the national cavern, raised a storm in Norway that did not abate for years. Ibsen was again a target for the bolts of critical and public hatred. Peer Gynt is the Scandinavian Faust. Having purged his soul of this perilous stuff, the poet, in 1873, finished his double drama Emperor and Galilean, not a success dramatically, but a strong, interesting work for the library, though it saw the footlights at Berlin, Leipsic, and Christiania. The apostate Emperor Julian is the protagonist. We discern Ibsen the mystic philosopher longing for his Third Kingdom.