3) Dreams and Dream-Stories. By Dr. Anna Kingsford. (Redway.)

(4) The Romance of a Shop. By Amy Levy. (Fisher Unwin.)

(5) Faithful and Unfaithful. By Margaret Lee. (Macmillan and Co.)

ONE OF THE BIBLES OF THE WORLD

(Pall Mall Gazette, February 12, 1889.)

The Kalevala is one of those poems that Mr. William Morris once described
as 'The Bibles of the World.' It takes its place as a national epic
beside the Homeric poems, the Niebelunge, the Shahnameth and the
Mahabharata, and the admirable translation just published by Mr. John
Martin Crawford is sure to be welcomed by all scholars and lovers of
primitive poetry. In his very interesting preface Mr. Crawford claims
for the Finns that they began earlier than any other European nation to
collect and preserve their ancient folklore. In the seventeenth century
we meet men of literary tastes like Palmskold who tried to collect and
interpret the various national songs of the fen-dwellers of the North.
But the Kalevala proper was collected by two great Finnish scholars of
our own century, Zacharias Topelius and Elias Lonnrot. Both were
practising physicians, and in this capacity came into frequent contact
with the people of Finland. Topelius, who collected eighty epical
fragments of the Kalevala, spent the last eleven years of his life in
bed, afflicted with a fatal disease. This misfortune, however, did not
damp his enthusiasm. Mr. Crawford tells us that he used to invite the
wandering Finnish merchants to his bedside and induce them to sing their
heroic poems which he copied down as soon as they were uttered, and that
whenever he heard of a renowned Finnish minstrel he did all in his power
to bring the song-man to his house in order that he might gather new
fragments of the national epic. Lonnrot travelled over the whole
country, on horseback, in reindeer sledges and in canoes, collecting the
old poems and songs from the hunters, the fishermen and the shepherds.
The people gave him every assistance, and he had the good fortune to come
across an old peasant, one of the oldest of the runolainen in the Russian
province of Wuokinlem, who was by far the most renowned song-man of the
country, and from him he got many of the most splendid runes of the poem.
And certainly the Kalevala, as it stands, is one of the world's great
poems. It is perhaps hardly accurate to describe it as an epic. It
lacks the central unity of a true epic in our sense of the wor