rit mild,
In new-recover'd seats, the happier day.

. . . . . . . . .

Far to the south, beyond the blue, there spreads
Another Heaven, the boundless--no one yet
Hath reach'd it; there hereafter shall arise
The second Asgard, with another name.

. . . . . . . . .

There re-assembling we shall see emerge
From the bright Ocean at our feet an earth
More fresh, more verdant than the last, with fruits
Self-springing, and a seed of man preserved,
Who then shall live in peace, as now in war.

Here is the grandest message that the Old Norse religion had to give,
and Matthew Arnold concerned himself with that alone. It is a far cry
from Regner Lodbrog to this. There is a fine touch in the introduction
of Regner into the lamentation of Balder. Arnold makes the old warrior
say of the ruder skalds:

But they harp ever on one string, and wake
Remembrance in our souls of war alone,
Such as on earth we valiantly have waged,
And blood, and ringing blows, and violent death.
But when thou sangest, Balder, thou didst strike
Another note, and, like a bird in spring,
Thy voice of joyance minded us, and youth,
And wife, and children, and our ancient home.

Here is a human Norseman, a figure not often presented in the versions
of the old stories that English poets and romancers have given us.
Arnold did a good service to Icelandic literature when he put into
Regner's mouth mild sentiments and a love for home and family. The note
is not lacking in the ancient literature, but it took Englishmen three
centuries to find it. It was the scholar, Matthew Arnold, who first
repeated the gentler strain in the rude music of the North, as it was
the scholar, Thomas Gray, who first echoed the "dreadful songs" of that
old psalmody. Gray has all the culture of his age, when it was still
possible to compass all knowledge in one lifetime; Arnold had all the
literary culture of his fuller century when multiplied sciences force a
scholar to be content with one segment of human knowledge. The former
had music and architecture and other sciences among his accomplishments;
the latter spread out in literature, as "Sohrab and Rustum," "Empedocles
on Etna," "Tristram and Iseult," as well as "Balder Dead" attest. The
quatrain prefixed to the volume containing the narrative and elegiac
poems be-tokens what joy Arnold had in his