who move in the story are shadowy inhabitants of no very
definite lands, whom no family claim as their forefathers. The very
want of this idea of family and aristocratic pride gives the
'Kalevala' a unique place among epics. It is emphatically an epic of
the people, of that class whose life contains no element of progress,
no break in continuity; which from age to age preserves, in solitude
and close communion with nature, the earliest beliefs of grey
antiquity. The Greek epic, on the other hand, has, as Preller[175]
points out, 'nothing to do with natural man, but with an ideal world
of heroes, with sons of the gods, with consecrated kings, heroes,
elders, _a kind of specific race of men_. The people exist only as
subsidiary to the great houses, as a mere background against which
stand out the shining figures of heroes; as a race of beings fresh and
rough from the hands of nature, with whom, and with whose concerns,
the great houses and their bards have little concern.' This
feeling--so universal in Greece, and in the feudal countries of
mediaeval Europe, that there are two kinds of men, the golden and the
brazen race, as Plato would have called them--is absent, with all its
results, in the 'Kalevala.'

Among the Finns we find no trace of an aristocracy; there is scarcely
a mention of kings, or priests; the heroes of the poem are really
popular heroes, fishers, smiths, husbandmen, 'medicine-men,' or
wizards; exaggerated shadows of the people, pursuing on a heroic
scale, not war, but the common daily business of primitive and
peaceful men. In recording their adventures, the 'Kalevala,' like the
shield of Achilles, reflects all the life of a race, the feasts, the
funerals, the rites of seed-time and harvest, of marriage and death,
the hymn, and the magical incantation.

Though without the interest of an unique position as a popular epic,
the 'Kalevala' is very valuable, both for its literary beauties and
for the confused mass of folklore which it contains.

Here old cosmogonies, attempts of man to represent to himself the
beginning of things, are mingled with the same wild imaginings as are
found everywhere in the shape of fairy-tales. We are hurried from an
account of the mystic egg of creation, to a hymn like that of the
Ambarval Brothers, to a strangely familiar scrap of a nursery story,
to an incident which we remember as occurring in almost identical
words in a Scotch ballad. We are among a people which endows