their contact with the Celts, both in Scotland and in Ireland. Both
peoples had valour, intellect, imagination: but the Celt had that which
the burly angular Norse character, however deep and stately, and however
humorous, wanted; namely, music of nature, tenderness, grace, rapidity,
playfulness; just the qualities, combining with the Scandinavian (and in
Scotland with the Angle) elements of character which have produced, in
Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric poetry second to none in
the world.

And so they were converted to what was then a dark and awful creed; a
creed of ascetic self-torture and purgatorial fires for those who escape
the still more dreadful, because endless, doom of the rest of the human
race. But, because it was a sad creed, it suited better, men who had,
when conscience re-awakened in them, but too good reason to be sad; and
the minsters and cloisters which sprang up over the whole of Northern
Europe, and even beyond it, along the dreary western shores of Greenland
itself, are the symbols of a splendid repentance for their own sins and
for the sins of their forefathers.

Gudruna herself, of whom I spoke just now, one of those old Norse
heroines who helped to discover America, though a historic personage, is
a symbolic one likewise, and the pattern of a whole class. She too,
after many journeys to Iceland, Greenland, and Winland, goes on a
pilgrimage to Rome, to get, I presume, absolution from the Pope himself
for all the sins of her strange, rich, stormy, wayward life.

Have you not read--many of you surely have--La Motte Fouque's romance of
"Sintram?" It embodies all that I would say. It is the spiritual drama
of that early Middle Age; very sad, morbid if you will, but true to fact.
The Lady Verena ought not, perhaps, to desert her husband, and shut