ld in her dark bosom, and
bound it tight in swaddling bands, out of which it could not shape
itself to joy and freedom. Neither Nordland nor Finmark see the sun for
many months in the year, and the difficulties and dangers of the road
shut them out from intercourse with the southern world. The spirit of
the North Pole rests oppressively over this region, and when in still
August nights it breathes from hence over southern Norway, then withers
the half-ripened harvests of the valleys and the plains, and the
icy-grey face of hunger stares stiffly from the northern cliffs upon
laborious but unhappy human multitudes. The sea breaks upon this coast
against a palisadoed fence of rocks and cliffs, around which swarm
flocks of polar birds with cries and screams. Storms alternate with
thick mists. The cliffs along this coast have extraordinary shapes; now
ascend they upwards like towers, now resemble beasts, now present
gigantic and terrific human profiles; and one can easily imagine how the
popular belief sees in them monsters and giants turned to stone, and why
their ancestors laid their Jotunhem in this desolate wilderness.

And a dark fragment of Paganism still lingers about this region even to
this day. It is frozen fast into the people's imagination; it is turned
to stone in the horrible shapes of nature, which once gave it life. The
light of the Gospel endeavours in vain to dissipate the shadows of a
thousand years; the Old Night holds them back. In vain the Holy Cross is
raised upon all the cliffs; the belief in magic and magic arts lives
still universally among the people. Witches sit, full of malice, in
their caves, and blow up storms for the sea-wanderers, so that they must
be unfortunate; and the ghost Stallo, a huge man, dressed in black, with
a staff in his hand, wanders about in the wildernesses, and challenges
the solitary traveller to meet him in the contest for life and death.

The Laplander, the nomade of the North, roving free with his reindeer
over undivided fields, appears like a romantic feature in this life; but
it must be viewed from afar. Near, every trace of beauty vanishes in the
fumes of brandy and the smoke of the Lapland hut.

Along the coasts, between the cliffs, and the rocks, and the hundreds of
islands which surround this strand, live a race of fishermen, who,
rivalling the sea-mew, skim the sea. Night and day, winter and summer,
swarm their boats upon the waves; through the whistling tempest,