as, as M. Preller {161} points out, 'nothing to
do with natural man, but with an ideal world of heroes, with sons of the
gods, with consecrated kings, heroes, elders, _a kind of specific race of
men_. The people exist only as subsidiary to the great houses, as a mere
background against which stand out the shining figures of heroes; as a
race of beings fresh and rough from the hands of nature, with whom, and
with whose concerns, the great houses and their bards have little
concern.' This feeling--so universal in Greece, and in the feudal
countries of mediaeval Europe, that there are two kinds of men, the
golden and the brazen race, as Plato would have called them--is absent,
with all its results, in the 'Kalevala.'

Among the Finns we find no trace of an aristocracy; there is scarcely a
mention of kings, or priests; the heroes of the poem are really popular
heroes, fishers, smiths, husbandmen, 'medicine-men,' or wizards;
exaggerated shadows of the people, pursuing on a heroic scale, not war,
but the common daily business of primitive and peaceful men. In
recording their adventures, the 'Kalevala,' like the shield of Achilles,
reflects all the life of a race, the feasts, the funerals, the rites of
seed-time and harvest of marriage and death, the hymn, and the magical
incantation. Were this all, the epic would only have the value of an
exhaustive collection of the popular ballads which, as we have seen, are
a poetical record of the intenser moments in the existence of
unsophisticated tribes. But the 'Kalevala' is distinguished from such a
collection, by presenting the ballads as they are produced by the events
of a continuous narrative, and thus it takes a distinct place between the
aristocratic epics of Greece, or of the Franks, and the scattered songs
which have been collected in Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, and
Italy.

Besides the interest of its unique position as a popular epic, the
'Kalevala' is very valuable, both for its literary beauties and for the
confused mass of folklore which it contains.

Here old cosmogonies, attempts of man to represent to himself the
beginning of things, are mingled with the same wild imaginings as are
found everywhere in the shape of fairy-tales. We are hurried from an
account of the mystic egg of creation, to a hymn like that of the
Ambarval Brothers, to a strangely familiar scrap of a nursery story, to
an incident which we remember as occurring in almost identical words i