The basis of society was the possession of land. The free land-holder was 'the free-necked man,' whose long hair floated over a neck that had never bent to a lord. He was 'the weaponed man,' who alone bore spear and sword.

A nation of farm

ers, as they had been in the Sunny East, as they are to-day. He might not be a tiller of the soil, but he must acquire it if he would be esteemed. The landless one could hope for no dis

tinction.

Accord

The social form was determined by the blood-bond. ing to kinship, men were grouped into companies of ten, called a tithing. Every ten tithings was called a hundred; and several hundreds, a shire. Each kinsman was his kinsman's keeper. Every crime was held to have been committed by all who were related to the doer of it, and against all who were related to the sufferer. From this sense of the value of the family tie sprung the rudiments of English justice. So strong is it, that his kinsfolk are the sole judges of the accused, for by their oath of his innocence or guilt he stands or falls. In their British home these judges will be a fixed number-the germ of the jury system. Other methods of appeal there are, The first pleases the savage nature. the hand of God, and will not he award the victory to the just? This practice will be revived in Normandy, introduced by the Conqueror into England, appealed to in 1631, and abolished only in 1817. The second inspires confidence; for fire and water are deities, and surely the gods will not harm the innocent or screen the guilty? Therefore, be ready to lift masses of red-hot iron in your hands, or to pass through flame.

the duel and the ordeal. Besides, is not the issue in

They hate cities. Then, as now, they must have independence and free air. Their villages are knots of farms. They live apart,' says Tacitus, each by himself, as woodside, plain, or fresh spring attracts him.' Each settlement must be isolated from its fellows. Each is jealously begirt by a belt of forest or fen, which parts it from neighboring communities,-a ring of common ground which none may take for his own, but which serves as the Golgotha where traitors and deserters meet their doom. This, it is said, is the special dwelling-place of the nix and the will-o'-the-wisp. Let none cross this death-line except he blow his horn; else he will be taken for a foe, and any man may lawfully slay him.

Around some moot-hill or sacred tree the whole community meet to administer justice and to legislate. Here the field is passed from seller to buyer by the delivery of a turf cut from its soil. Here the aggrieved may present his grievance. The elder men' state the 'customs,' and the evil-doer is sentenced to make pecuniary reparation. Eye for eye,' life for life, or for each fair damages, is the yet unwritten code. The body and its members have each their legal price. Only treason, desertion, and poison involve capital punishment, and sentence is pronounced by the priest. Here, too, the king of the tribe chosen from among the ablest of its chiefs-and the Witan, the Wise Men, who limit his jurisdiction, convene to settle questions of peace and war, or to transact other important affairs. The warriors, met in arms, express their approval by rattling their armor, their dissent by murmurs. Later, this assembly will be known as the Parliament of a great empire. Among the nobility, there is one who is the king's chosen confidant, the 'knower of secrets,' the 'counsellor.' In after times he will be known as the Prime Minister.

Knowledge was transmitted less by writing than by oral tradition, and almost wholly in the form of verse. There was a perpetual order of men, like the rhapsodists of ancient Greece and the bards of the Celtic tribes, who were at once poets and historians; whose exclusive employment it was to learn and repeat; wandering minstrels they were, travelling about from land to land, chanting to the people the fortunes of the latest battle or the exploits of their ancestors, a delightful link of union, loved and revered. The honors bestowed upon them were natural to an age in which reading and writing were mysteries. On arms, trinkets, amulets, and utensils, sometimes on the bark of trees, and on wooden tablets, for the purpose of memorials or of epistolary correspondence, were engraven certain wonderful characters called runes. By their potent spells, some runes, it was believed, could lull the tempest, stop the vessel in her course, divert the arrow in its flight, arrest the career of witches through the air, cause love or hatred, raise the dead, and extort from them the secrets of the spirit-world. Thus says the heroine of a Northern

romance:

'Like a Virgin of the Shield I roved o'er the sea,
My arm was victorious, my valor was free;
By prowess, by runic enchantment and song,

I raised up the weak, and I beat down the strong.'

Would we know the soul of a people, let us seek it in their religion, the unseen spiritual fountain whence flow all their outward acts. In the beginning, we are told, were two worlds,— Niflheim, the frozen, and Muspel the burning. From the falling snow-flakes, quickened by the Unknown who sent the heated blast, was born Ymer the giant:

'When Ymer lived

Was sand, nor sea,
Nor cooling wave;

No earth was found
Nor heaven above;
One chaos all,

And nowhere grass.'

Fallen asleep, from his arm-pits spring the frost-giants. cow, born also of melting snow, feeds him with four milk-rivers. Whilst licking his perspiration from the rocks, there came at evening out of the stones a man's hair, the second day a man's head, and the third all the man was there. His name was Bure. His grandsons, Odin, Vile, and Ve, kill the giant Ymer. Dragging his body to the abyss of space, they form of it the visible universe; from his flesh, the land; from his bones, the mountains; from his hair, the forests; from his teeth and jaws, the stones and pebbles; from his blood, the ocean, in the midst of which they fix the earth; from his skull, the vaulted sky, raised and supported by a dwarf under each corner,-Austre, Westre, Nordre, and Sudre, from his brains, scattered in the air, the melancholy clouds; from his hair, trees and plants; from his eyebrows, a wall of defense against the giants. The flying sparks and red-hot flakes cast out of Muspel they placed in the heavens, and said: 'Let there be light.' Far in the North sits a giant, 'the corpse swallower,' clad with eagles' plumes. When he spreads his wings for flight, the winds, which yet no mortal can discern, fan fire into flame, or lash the waves into foam. As the sons of Bor, 'powerful and fair,' were walking along the sea-beach, they found two trees, stately and graceful, and from them created the first human pair, man and woman,-Ask and Embla:

Odin gave spirit,
Honer gave mind,
Loder gave blood
And lovely hue.'

Nobler conception is this, than the Greek and Hebrew of clod or

stone.

Diviner symbol is this of the trees, Ash and Elm, which, as they grow heavenward, show an unconscious attraction to that which is heavenly.

From the mould of Ymer are bred, as worms, the dwarfs, who by command of the gods receive human form and sense. Among the rocks, in the wild mountain-gorges they dwell. When we hear the echo from wood or hill or dale, there stands a dwarf who repeats our words. They had charge of the gold and precious minerals. With their aprons on, they hammered and smelted, and

'Rock crystals from sand and hard flint they made,

Which, tinged with the rosebud's dye,

They cast into rubies and carbuncles red,

And hid them in cracks hard by.'

In the summer's sun, when the mist hangs over the sea, may be seen, sitting on the surface of the water, the mermaid, combing her long golden hair with golden comb, or driving her snowwhite cattle to the strands. No household prospers without its domestic spirit. Oft the favored maid finds in the morning that her kitchen is swept and the water brought. The buried treasure has its sleepless dragon, and the rivulet its water-sprite. The Swede delights to tell of the boy of the stream, who haunts the glassy brooks that steal through meadows green, and sits on the silver waves at moonlight, playing his harp to the elves who dance on the flowery margin.

We retain in the days of the week a compendium of the old English creed. A son and a daughter, lovely and graceful, are appointed by the Powers to journey round heaven each day with chariot and steeds, 'to count years for men,' each ever pursued by a ravenous wolf. The girl is Sol, the Sun, with meteor eyes and burning plumes; the boy is Maane, the Moon, with white fire laden. The festival-days consecrated to them were hence known as Sun's-daeg and Moon's-daeg, whence our Sunday and Monday. Reversing the mythology of the Greeks and Romans, the Teutons worshipped the sun as a female and the moon as a male deity, from an odd notion that if the latter were addressed as a goddess their wives would be their masters. The memory of Tyr, the dark, dread, daring, and intrepid one, is embalmed in Tuesday; his grandmother was an ugly giantess with nine hundred heads. Wodin, or Odin, survives in Wednesday. He does

not create the world, but arranges and governs it. He is the allpervading spirit, the infinite wanderer. Two wolves lie at his feet; and on his shoulders sit two gifted ravens, which fly, on his behests, to the uttermost regions. He wakes the soul to thought, gives science and lore, inspires the song of the bard and the incantation of the sorcerer, blunts the point of the javelin, renders his warriors invisible; with a hero's heart and voice, tells the brave how by valor a man may become a god; explains to mortals their destiny here,- makes existence articulate and melodious. Incarnated as a seer and magician unknown thousands of years ago, he led the Teutonic throng into Scandinavia, across seas and rivers in a wonderful ship built by dwarfs, so marvellously constructed that, when they wished to land, it could be taken to pieces, rolled up, and put in the pocket. Our Thursday is Thor's day, son of Odin. He is a spring-god, subduing the frostgiants. The thunder is his wrath. The gathering of the black clouds is the drawing down of his angry brows. The bursting firebolt is the all-rending hammer flung from his hand. The peal,that is the roll of his chariot over the mountain-tops. In his mansion are five hundred and forty halls. Freyja, the Venus of the North, in whom are beauty, grace, gentleness, the longings, joys, and tears of love, is incarnated in Friday. Sæter, an obscure water-deity, represented as standing upon a fish, with a bucket in his hand, is commemorated in Saturday. But beyond. all the gods who are known and named, there is the feeling, the instinct, the presentiment of One who is unseen and imperishable, the everlasting Adamant lower than which the confused wreck of revolutionary things cannot fall:

"Then comes another

Yet more mighty,

But Him dare I not

Venture to name:

Few look further forward

Than to the time

When Odin goes

To meet the wolf.'

Is not the last and highest consecration of all true religion an altar to 'The Unknown God?'

All things exist in antagonism. No sooner are the giants created than the contest for empire begins. When Ymer is killed, the crimson flood drowns all save one, who with his wife escapes