sheep disease, famine, and the terrible
eruptions of 1765 and 1783, follow one another swiftly and with terrible
effect. At the beginning of the present century Iceland, however,
began to shake off the stupor her ill-hap had brought upon her, and
as European attention had been drawn to her, she was listened to.
Newspapers, periodicals, and a Useful Knowledge Society were started;
then came free trade, and the "home-rule" struggle, which met with
partial success in 1874, and is still being carried on. A colony, Gimli,
in far-off Canada, has been formed of Icelandic emigrants, and large
numbers have left their mother-land; but there are many co-operative
societies organised now, which it is hoped will be able to so revive the
old resources of the island as to make provision for the old population
and ways of life. There is now again a representative central council,
but very many of the old rights and powers have not been yet restored.
The condition of society is peculiar absence of towns, social equality,
no abject poverty or great wealth, rarity of crime, making it easy for
the whole country to be administered as a co-operative commonwealth
without the great and striking changes rendered necessary by more
complicated systems.

Iceland has always borne a high name for learning and literature; on
both sides of their descent people inherited special poetic power. Some
of older Eddaic fragments attest the great reach and deep overpowering
strength of imagination possessed by their Norse ancestors; and
they themselves had been quickened by a new leaven. During the first
generations of the "land-taking" a great school of poetry which had
arisen among the Norsemen of the Western Isles was brought by them to
Iceland. (11) The poems then produced are quite beyond parallel with
those of any Teutonic language for centuries after their date, which lay
between the beginning of the ninth and the end of the tenth centuries.
Through the Greenland colony also came two, or perhaps more, great poems
of this western school. This school grew out of the stress and storm of
the viking life, with its wild adventure and varied commerce, and the
close contact with an artistic and inventive folk, possessed of high
culture and great learning. The infusion of Celtic blood, however
slight it may have been, had also something to do with the swift intense
feeling and rapidity of passion of the earlier Icelandic poets. They
are hot-headed and hot-heart