thrown. At first sight there seems something unnatural and
unaccountable in this apparent contradiction in the character of the
nation, manifested respectively in their prose and their poetry. But on
farther examination all becomes clear as a spring day. Their prose was,
as their whole literature might and should have been, contemporary with
their civilization through its various phases. Metaphysics is the last
refinement, or rather, corruption, which national literature undergoes.
Their prose had naturally arrived at this stage when the true poetic
feeling woke for the first time. And in spite of the rational tendencies
of the age, it assumed that character of warm, bodily imagination which
marks all early literatures. The tendency to the mysterious and the
superhuman has mostly vanished, and more vivid conceptions of every
thing have, under their Christian development, taken the place of dim
magic and weird creations. Northern poets still delight in dealing with
those wonderful poetical inventions of their own ancient mythology, and
revel among the elves and dwarfs that surround the bosoms of mountains
and woods. Lif, with her golden hair, Gerda, with cheeks like auroras,
the cunning Loke, with his mixture of guile, wickedness and deceit,
Thor's mighty Mjoelner, and the mead-horns of Walhalla--from among these
wonderful beings, they have culled with a careless hand, and every sprig
and flower is radiant with poetic beauty. The taste for old legends and
traditions has revived within a few years, and scholars and antiquarians
are now laying open unknown mines of treasure.

A TRUE ROMANCE.

Among my friends at Rome, during a few weeks that I spent there, was one
old resident of the 'Eternal City' whom I had often begged to give me
some authentic narrative of Catholic experience. He was naturally
reserved, jealously truthful, a 'know-nothing' upon religious
controversy, not at all the man to invent an exciting story, not fond of
legends, Romish or Genevan, not a violent partisan of republicanism in
church or state, and not familiar enough with American thought to
suspect the use that might be made in the United States of such an
incident as I am now to repeat. In fact, as I compare him with other
sources of intelligence open to travelers, sure as I am that no one
could question his belief of whatever he told, every weight that
character, intelligence, years, experience, could confer, rests upon
the only monkish s