Our artist returned to Europe in 1846, and for five years led a wandering life of concert-giving in England, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, and Spain, adding to his laurels by the recognition everywhere conceded of the increased soundness and musicianly excellence of his playing.  It was indeed at this period that Ole Bull attained his best as a virtuoso.  He had been previously seduced by the example of Paganini, and in the attempt to master the more strange and remote difficulties of the instrument had often laid himself open to serious criticism.  But Ole Bull gradually formed a style of his own which was the outcome of his passion for descriptive and poetic playing, and the correlative of the mode of composition which he adopted.  In still later years Ole Bull seems to have returned again to what might be termed claptrap and trickery in his art, and to have desired rather to excite wonder and curiosity than to charm the sensibilities or to satisfy the requirements of sound musical taste.

In 1851 Ole Bull returned home with the patriotic purpose of establishing a strictly national theatre.  This had been for a long time one of the many dreams which his active imagination had conjured up as a part of his mission.  He was one of the earliest of that school of reformers, of whom we have heard so much of late years, that urge the readoption of the old Norse language—­or, what is nearest to it now, the Icelandic—­as the vehicle of art and literature.  In the attempt to dethrone Dansk from its preeminence as the language of the drama, Ole Bull signally failed, and his Norwegian theatre, established at Bergen, proved only an insatiable tax on money-resources earned in other directions.

The year succeeding this, Ole Bull again visited the United States, and spent five years here.  The return to America did not altogether contemplate the pursuit of music, for there had been for a good while boiling in his brain, among other schemes, the project of a great Scandinavian colony, to be established in Pennsylvania under his auspices.  He purchased one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of land on the Susquehanna, and hundreds of sturdy Norwegians flocked over to the land of milk and honey thus auspiciously opened to them.  Timber was felled, ground cleared, churches, cottages, school-houses built, and everything was progressing desirably, when the ambitious colonizer discovered that the parties who sold him the land were swindlers without any rightful claim to it.  With the unbusiness-like carelessness of the man of genius, our artist had not investigated the claims of others on the property, and he thus became involved in a most perplexing and expensive suit at law.  He attempted to punish the rascals who so nearly ruined him, but they were shielded behind the quips and quirks of the law, and got away scot free.  Ole Bull’s previously ample means were so heavily drained by this misfortune that he was compelled to take up his