mother-tongue, are willing to forego the emoluments and recognition
to be gained from audiences in more favored lands: for the sake of
enriching their native literature; for the sake of showing both the
world and their own people that neither in this art are they inferior to
other nations; for the sake of demonstrating to their satisfaction
that a contribution of Iceland to world-literature is no more an
impossibility now than in the older times, when it enriched us with
lore and history, and gave the world what Greece and Rome did not, the
realistic novel.

Three authors divide the honors in this field: Matthias Jochumsson, a
gifted lyric poet, now in his old age; the promising young playwright,
Johann Sigurjonsson; and Indridi Einarsson, now in his prime, whose most
original contribution to Icelandic literature is herewith presented.
The poet having excellent command of English, I am fortunate to be
able (with his permission) to quote _ipsissima verba_ on his life and
development.

'I was born in the North of Iceland, on April 30, 1851, and was a
farmer's boy of good old family. My chief work at home was haymaking in
summer, and in winter being a shepherd. Every spring I was up all the
long bright nights, watching the flock that they should not damage the
cultivated soil by eating the young grass. I think that solitude (from
the eighth to fourteenth year of my life) has fostered my fancy
and imagination and dipped me deep in the romanticism of that time
(1858-64). In 1865 I went to Reykjavik, and was initiated at the Lyceum
(Latin school) in the spring of 1866. I went through the Lyceum in
ordinary course. When I began to read Virgilius I felt as if I got wings
on my immortal soul, and I think I shall never lose them wholly again.
I began to read the poets, starting with the comedies of Old Holberg the
Dane, and passing to Schiller and Goethe and Heine. I read all plays
of Shakespeare (in Danish translation, then). I studied "Oidipous
Tyrannos," Sophocles' awful tragedy, in the original, and read Plautus
and Terentius as other boys, Icelandic and Danish fiction.

'During my first year at college I saw Matthias Jochumsson's
"Utilegumenn" (The Outlaws) performed at Reykjavik: they had then very
fine Icelandic scenery, and went home in ecstasy over the performance,
feeling that I had seen the brightest and strongest play in the world.
Of my reading I thought "Macbeth," "Gretchen im Carcer" ("Faust" I),
and "Oidipous