hears the voice of his own mother."

After enumerating and inculcating in the same manner all the duties of the
day, the conduct to be observed toward every member of the
family--father-in-law, mother-in-law, sister, and brother-in-law, and the
children of them--we find a very minute code of conduct set forth in
regard to neighbours and acquaintances. The young wife is especially
warned against gossip, against listening to any stories about what happens
in other people's houses, and against telling anybody what goes on within
her own. One piece of advice is memorable. If the young wife is asked
whether she is well fed, she should reply always that she has the best of
everything which a house can afford, this even if she should have been
left without any proper nourishment for several days. Evidently the
condition of submission to which Finnish women were reduced by custom was
something much less merciful than has ever been known in Eastern
countries. Only a very generous nature could bear such discipline; and we
have many glimpses in the poem of charming natures of this kind.

You have seen that merely as a collection of wonderful stories the
Kalevala is of extraordinary interest, that it is also of interest as
describing the social ethics of a little known people--finally that it is
of interest, of very remarkable interest, merely as natural poetry--poetry
treating of wild nature, especially rivers and forests and mountains, of
the life of the fisher and hunter and wood-cutter. Indeed, so far as this
kind of poetry is concerned, the "Kalevala" stands alone among the older
productions of European poetry. You do not find this love of nature in
Scandinavian poetry, nor in Anglo-Saxon poetry, nor in old German poetry,
much less in the earlier form of French, Italian, or Spanish poetry. The
old Northern poetry comes nearest to it; for in Anglo-Saxon composition we
can find at least wonderful descriptions of the sea, of stones, of the
hard life of sailors. But the dominant tone in Northern poetry is war; it
is in descriptions of battle, or in accounts of the death of heroes, that
the ancient English or ancient Scandinavian poets excelled In Finnish
poetry, on the other hand, there is little or nothing about war. These
peaceful people never had any warlike history; their life was agricultural
for the most part, with little or no violence except such as the
excitement of hunting and fishing could produce. Therefore they had ple