our country can be assured, great issues must be raised, and fierce political struggles traversed. We have a firm and confident belief that the forces on the side of progress are sufficient to achieve what is required for this consummation, by peaceful and constitutional reforms; but the cause will not be won without strenuous efforts.

It will not be won without the aid of men who, in the measure of their gifts, will bring to bear upon the task the qualities of which in Cobden's life we have such enduring proofs: pure morality, keen intelligence, perfect disinterestedness, undaunted courage, indomitable tenacity of purpose, high patriotism, and an immoveable faith in the predestined triumph of good over evil.

That the principles of public morality which Cobden devoted his life to enforce, will ultimately prevail in the government of the world, we think that no one who believes in God or man can doubt. Whether it be in store for our country first to achieve, by their adoption, the last triumphs of civilisation, and to hold her place in the van of human progress, or whether to other races, and to other communities, will be confided this great mission, it is not for us to determine.

But those who trust that this may yet be England's destiny, who, in spite of much which they deplore, delight to look upon her past with pride and her future with hope, will ever revere the memory of Cobden, as of one whose life-long aim it was to lay the foundations of her empire in her moral greatness, in the supremacy of reason, and in the majesty of law,-and will feel with us that the international man' was also, and still more, an Englishman.

ART. IV.-On the Character of the Old Northern Poetry.

Omnibus Barbaris Gothi sapientiores semper exstiterunt, Græcisque pæne consimiles.'-JORNANDES, De rebus Geticis.

I.

IT is remarkable that Hegel, who said that the idea of a philosopher required that he should know everything, and who pretended himself to know almost everything,' neither makes any mention of the Northern mythology in his Philosophy of Religion, nor of Northern poetry in his Esthetics. Northern mythology and Northern poetry have hitherto been considered chiefly from the antiquarian's point of view, and the attention which is justly bestowed on classical literature has hitherto never fallen to the lot of the Eddas or the Skalds. But though the German philosopher has not given to the poetry of the North a place in his scientific classification of poetry, he, perhaps without knowing it, has described all its properties in his essay upon the so-called 'romantic' poetry. In describing the elements of the romantic poetry, he exactly points out the distinguishing features of the Northern poetry, the energetic overbearing will, the deep reserved mind, that cannot utter itself, but in its struggle against itself either goes to destruction unobserved, like Ophelia, or brings ruin on itself and others, like Hamlet. Now those elements the German philosopher deduces from Christianity; but they certainly are less due to the softening influence of our mild and blessed creed, than to the hardening and bracing air of the North; and Shakspeare, when conceiving such characters as Macbeth and Richard III., undoubtedly was rather a Northern than a Christian poet. Even Hamlet is much more a type of Northern reserve, with all its passion, and of Northern taciturnity, with all its eloquence, than of a Christian's struggling self-reflection. Hamlet speaks only in monologues.

The historical and national elements have never been perfectly abolished, but only modified by religious and political crises. The Wandering Jew might inform us that the modern Greek still preserves some of the qualities of the heroes of Salamis and Thermopyla; that in the modern Roman there still are to be found traces of the enemies of Hannibal; and that there still lingers a sound from King Harold Fairhair's time in the voice of the modern inhabitant of the Gudbrandsdale. The outward features are preserved, though the spirit may evaporate. The language keeps the old sound, though the mind may vanish.

Country and climate are the same, though the temper of the people may be altered to a certain extent.

The Northern spirit which existed previous to Christianity, the Northern poetry which was the product of this spirit, has a greater interest than that of mere antiquity; it may still be traced down to Christian times; it is echoed forth in the best productions of the romantic poetry, and consequently deserves a place in the history of literature.

A proof of this may be found in the Song of the Sun' (Sólarljós) in the elder or Sæmund's Edda. The whole poem undoubtedly belongs to Christian times; the old gods have fled, and White Christ' has taken their place, but the mixture of energy and resignation which belongs to the Northern mind breathes forth from every line. Like all compositions belonging to two different historical epochs, and grown on the border between the two, the 'Song of the Sun' has the double character which always arises from the conflict, and at the same time, from the blending of dissimilar elements. We thus find in this poem the gloomy mysticism of the heathen coupled with the humility of the Christian, the crafty cunning of Odin as we know it from Hávamál, the Northern worldly wisdom side by side with the purity of Christian morals. But what is especially striking in this song is the fusion of Christianity and Paganism where the Northern and the Catholic mysticism are identified with each other, and when Christian sorrow softens down heathen gloom. We might believe we were reading a translation of Dante's Inferno in strophe 53-75 of Sólarljós, were we not suddenly awakened by reminiscence from Völuspá and the mythic Edda-songs, in strophe 55, 56:

From the north I saw ride

The sons of the men ;

They were seven together,

From full horns they drank

The

pure mead

From the well of the god of the ring."

Strophes 58-75 again recall Dante. The heathen strain is resumed from strophe 76 to 81, and the concluding strophes 82, 83, are Christian, and even so modern that funeral speeches in the North at the present day frequently are concluded with the three last lines

'God grant rest to the dead

And grace to the living.'

The little episode in strophes 10-14, touching the controversy of two friends about a woman, is neither specifically Christian 1 Mimir; i.e., from the well of poetry.

nor Northern. Upon the whole, the song is a poetical expression of two historical phases, which, though conflicting, have many points of contact.

Its relationship to Christianity is the great charm of Northern poetry, and distinguishes it eminently from the classic literature. This relationship makes the Northern heathen literature a singular phenomenon in Paganism, without anything analogous to it, saye some few instances of Oriental and Indian mysticism. But the religion of nature is all that Northern poetry has in common with Indian and Persian poetry. Oriental lust and luxury, Indian softness and fragrance of roses, must freeze to death in the winter of the North; the prurient polygamy of the Eastern nations cannot find its way to the deep starry heaven and the pure snow of the North, which, on the contrary, especially in the relations between the sexes, develops naturally a chastity and purity, which the Catholicism and chivalry of the middle ages brought forth through the influence of religion.

The relation between the sexes, and the manner in which woman is treated by man, are on the whole a good test of real culture in different ages and nations. In the East, the wife was in very truth a slave, had to share the burden of despotic treatment with a number of rivals; the division of the burden in this case being a multiplication. In Greece, we find a similar humiliation of woman; an intimate and dignified connexion between the sexes is an exception, save, perhaps, in the intellectual intercourse between lover and hetæra. Even the son is hardly grown before he makes his mother feel something like a husband's authority. Telemachus threatens to send Penelope away from Ithaca to her parents, that her suitors may there compete for her hand; he orders her to go to her attendants, etc. In the Greek world, woman is not subjected to all the evils of polygamy, but the connexion between one man and one woman is loose. In the Trojan war, we find female slaves who are also paramours, and in the fullest development of Athenian civilisation we find the institution of the hetæræ. But however accomplished Diotima may be, her lover injures his legitimate wife, and consequently violates the sanctity of matrimony by his relations to Diotima. In Rome, the wife is both bought and sold, her education neglected, her social position subordinate; the husband may divorce her at his pleasure and take another wife; he loves other women, she other men; the difference is, that what he does openly she does secretly. The Roman marriage is a formal, a political institution; nothing more. Such is married life in the heathen world.

In the North, we find an exception to this rule. The Northern

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heathen treats woman with esteem. He is chaste, and he therefore, as Tacitus writes of the Germans, begets strong and healthy, free and daring sons, a terror to the Romans and other luxurious Southerners. The Northern wife has a social position, firm and sure; she brings up the children, manages the house, stands by her husband with good advice and cheerfulness, dresses the wounds of the warriors, refreshes the returning champion with mead and mirth, and prepares him an invigorating rest in a marriage-bed undefiled. Her courage and cleverness equal his own, and frequently the Northern warrior owes life and victory to his mate. In the North, a woman must be legally and regularly wooed, and her parents consulted; if she afterwards has reason to complain of her husband's treatment, or if she is otherwise dissatisfied with her lot, she may return to her parents and wed another man (Laxdæla-saga). This is the reason why there are to be found in Northern Paganism so many instances of highmindedness and nobility in woman; she is possessed of a touching faithfulness and firmness which is fitly matched with the unflinching valour and undaunted energy of the Northern man.

The poetry of the North, consequently, has very little in common with classical literature. Greek and Roman poetry is regular and harmonious; Northern poetry is elevated and dissonant. In the former, spirit and form keep pace with one another; in the latter, the spirit constantly outruns and over-rides the form. In the former, the tragic as well as the comic element keeps within the limits of beauty; in the latter, sorrow is deepened into humour, and the comic becomes grotesque. The Greek utters his passion in its fulness, he does not even fear to express himself by inarticulate interjections; the Northern character grows more silent as his passion increases; being too well aware of the insufficiency of speech to exhaust his passion, of the inadequateness of the form to express the spirit, he disdains to give vent to it. There the tragic borders on humour, because at its highest pitch the passion of the Northerner voluntarily disguises itself in a counterfeit appearance. Foolishness, ignorance, stupidity, simplicity, joy, and mirth, are the masks of the embittered and sorrowful Northern warrior thirsting after revenge; he lies down in the kitchen and plays the fool, while he broods over revenge and ambition. It was the custom of Viga-Glum2 and his kin to smile when they were insulted, and in the Northern Sagas self-possession is always regarded as a manly quality (at vera stilltr vel). The true Northern hero never

1 Gisli the Outlaw, Burnt Njal, Grettis Saga, Earl Hakon, etc.

2 See Viga-Glum's Saga, translated by Sir Edmund Head, Bart., K.C.B.,