hort
summer days, would yield no more; or wet harvests spoiled the crops, or
heavy snows starved the cattle. And so the Norseman launched his ships
when the lands were sown in spring, and went forth to pillage or to
trade, as luck would have, to summerted, as he himself called it; and
came back, if he ever came, in autumn to the women to help at harvest-
time, with blood upon his hand. But had he stayed at home, blood would
have been there still. Three out of four of them had been mixed up in
some man-slaying, or had some blood-feud to avenge among their own kin.

The whole of Scandinavia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Orkney, and the rest,
remind me ever of that terrible picture of the great Norse painter,
Tiddeman, in which two splendid youths, lashed together, in true Norse
duel fashion by the waist, are hewing each other to death with the short
axe, about some hot words over their ale. The loss of life, and that of
the most gallant of the young, in those days must have been enormous. If
the vitality of the race had not been even more enormous, they must have
destroyed each other, as the Red Indians have done, off the face of the
earth. They lived these Norsemen, not to live--they lived to die. For
what cared they? Death--what was death to them? what it was to the
Jomsburger Viking, who, when led out to execution, said to the headsman:
"Die! with all pleasure. We used to question in Jomsburg whether a man
felt when his head was off? Now I shall know; but if I do, take care,
for I shall smite thee with my knife. And meanwhile, spoil not this long
hair of mine; it is so beautiful."

But, oh! what waste! What might not these men have done if they had
sought peace, not war; if they had learned a few centuries sooner to do
justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their God?

And yet one loves them, blood-stained as they are. Your own poets, men
brought up under circumstances, under ideas the most opposite to theirs,
love them, and cannot help it. And why? It is not merely for their bold
daring, it is not merely for their stern endurance; nor again that they
had in them that shift and thrift, those steady and common-sense business
habits, which made their noblest men not ashamed to go on voyages of
merchandise. Nor is it, again, that grim humour--humour as of the modern
Scotch--which so often flashes out into an actual jest, but more usually
underlies unspoken all their deeds. Is it not rather that these m