nd sublimity of the heathen
saga with the grace and artistic skill of the literature of civilization.
The poetry of the Northmen, like their lives, was bold, defiant, and full
of a rude, untamed energy. It was inspired by exhibitions of power
rather than of beauty. Its heroes were beastly revellers or cruel and
ferocious plunderers; its heroines unsexed hoidens, playing the ugliest
tricks with their lovers, and repaying slights with bloody revenge,--very
dangerous and unsatisfactory companions for any other than the fire-
eating Vikings and redhanded, unwashed Berserkers. Significant of a
religion which reverenced the strong rather than the good, and which
regarded as meritorious the unrestrained indulgence of the passions, it
delighted to sing the praises of some coarse debauch or pitiless
slaughter. The voice of its scalds was often but the scream of the
carrion-bird, or the howl of the wolf, scenting human blood:--

"Unlike to human sounds it came;
Unmixed, unmelodized with breath;
But grinding through some scrannel frame,
Creaked from the bony lungs of Death."

Its gods were brutal giant forces, patrons of war, robbery, and drunken
revelry; its heaven a vast cloud-built ale-house, where ghostly warriors
drank from the skulls of their victims; its hell a frozen horror of
desolation and darkness,--all that the gloomy Northern imagination could
superadd to the repulsive and frightful features of arctic scenery:
volcanoes spouting fire through craters rimmed with perpetual frost,
boiling caldrons flinging their fierce jets high into the air, and huge
jokuls, or ice-mountains, loosened and upheaved by volcanic agencies,
crawling slowly seaward, like misshapen monsters endowed with life,--a
region of misery unutterable, to be avoided only by diligence in robbery
and courage in murder.

What a work had Christianity to perform upon such a people as the
Icelanders, for instance, of the tenth century!--to substitute in rude,
savage minds the idea of its benign and gentle Founder for that of the
Thor and Woden of Norse mythology; the forgiveness, charity, and humility
of the Gospel for the revenge, hatred, and pride inculcated by the Eddas.
And is it not one of the strongest proofs of the divine life and power of
that Gospel, that, under its influence, the hard and cruel Norse heart
has been so softened and humanized that at this moment one of the best
illustrat