nd with their eye-glasses
to their eyes, before such a play, which, without more ado, would swamp
all their critical ideas and inkstands, and show them death and horror
in real downright earnest.

How such a reviewer would grow in ability to understand what is imposing
and powerful in a poetical composition, and in the desires it awakens,
if he only once in his life had seen the "Horseman," [A remarkable
mountain in Nordland.] on a stormy day, with its height of 1700 feet,
riding southwards out in the surf, while his cloak fluttered from his
shoulder towards the north, and, besides the giant himself in his
might, had seen, in prefect illusion, the horse's head, his ear, his
neck, his snaffle and his majestic chest.

It is up in the north that northern popular imagination, from the time
of the myths, has laid the home of a whole army of wickedness; there the
Fin folk have practised their magic arts, and woven their spells; and
there by the dark, wintry-grey breakers of the Arctic Sea, live yet the
ancient gods of evil, driven out to earth's farthest limits, those
demoniacal, terrible, half-formless powers of darkness, with whom the
Aases fought, but St. Olaf, with his victorious, dazzling, cross-hilt
sword, "turned to stock and stone."

That which can so easily be put aside as superstition, when one is
sitting safely in the middle of civilisation--and yet still lives as a
natural power in the people--is represented, on the whole, in pigmy
proportions in the south. Here they have a little terror of small
hobgoblins, good-natured fairies, a love-sick river-sprite, and so
forth, beings who with us in the north, almost go about our houses like
superstition's tame domestic animals. You have there, too, good-natured
elves, who carry on their peaceful boating and coasting trade invisibly
among the people. But then, in addition, natural terror creates a whole
host of wicked demons, who draw people with an irresistible power, the
ghosts of drowned men, who have not had Christian burial, mountain
ogres, the sea-sprite, who rows in a half boat, and shrieks horribly on
the fjords on winter nights. Many who really were in danger have let
their chance of safety go for fear of him, and the visionaries can
actually see him.

But if Nature's great power, brooding with crushing weight over life on
this wintry, surf-beat, iron-bound coast, which lies in twilight for
nine months, and for three of these altogether loses the sun, creates