the setting is not
northern; witness Sidney Dobell's _Balder_, where not even a single
allusion is made to Icelandic matters.

MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888).

Matthew Arnold's strong sympathy with noble and virile literature of
whatever age or nation led him in time to Old Norse, and his poem
"Balder Dead" is of distinct importance among the works of the
nineteenth century in English literature. It is an addition of permanent
value to our poetry, because of its marked originality and its high
ethical tone. "Mallet, and his version of the Edda, is all the poem is
based upon," says Arnold.[20] It is the poet's divinely implanted
instinct that gathers from the few chapters of an old book a knowledge
wonderfully full and deep of the cosmogony and eschatology of the
northern nations of Europe. "Balder Dead" tells the familiar story of
the whitest of the gods, but it also contains the essence of Old
Icelandic religion; indeed there is no single short work in our language
which gives a tithe of the information about the North, its spirit, and
its philosophy, which this poem of Matthew Arnold's sets forth. In
future days a text-book of original English poems will be in the hands
of our boys and girls which will enable them to get, through the medium
of their own language, the message and the spirit of foreign literature.
Old Norse song will need no other representative than Matthew Arnold's
"Balder Dead."

This is an original poem. It does not imitate the verse nor the word of
the older song, but the flavor of it is here. Gray and his imitators
drew from the Icelandic fountain "dreadful songs" and many poets since
have heard no milder note. Matthew Arnold's instincts were for peace and
the arts of peace, and he found in Balder a type for the ennobling of
our own century. Balder says to his brother who has come to lament that
Lok's machinations will keep the best beloved of the gods in Niflheim:

For I am long since weary of your storm
Of carnage, and find, Hermod, in your life
Something too much of war and broils, which make
Life one perpetual fight, a bath of blood.
Mine eyes are dizzy with the arrowy hail;
Mine ears are stunn'd with blows, and sick for calm.

Arnold has exalted the Revelator of the Northern mythology, and in
magnificent poetry sets forth his apocalyptic vision:

Unarm'd, inglorious; I attend the course
Of ages, and my late return to light,
In times less alien to a spi