ally
vulgar error is the growing conviction that artistic skill alone
determines merit in literature, and that intellect, as the French,
beginning mildly with Voltaire and ending violently with Sainte-Beuve,
assert is of far less importance than style. "_Le style_, _c'est
l'esprit du siecle_." Apropos of which I remarked that in the warlike
Middle Age in France the motto might have been "_L'homme c'est le_
STEEL." Then came the age of wigs, when the cry was, "_L'homme c'est le_
STYLE." And now we are in the swindling and bogus-company-promoting age,
when it might be proclaimed that "_L'homme c'est le_ STEAL."

There was another book which I read through and through in early
childhood to great profit. This was Cottle's "Alfred," an epic of some
merit, but chiefly in this, that it sets forth tolerably clearly the old
Norse life and religion. George Boker owned and gave me some time after
a book entitled "Five Norse Poems," in the original, and translated. This
with Grey's poems, which latter I possessed, laid the basis for a deep
interest in after years in Northern antiquities; they were soon followed
by Mallett; and if I have since read many sagas in Icelandic and studied
with keenest interest the museums of the North, the first incentive
thereto came from my boyish reading. When I was sixteen I executed a
poetic version of the "Death Song of Regner Lodbrog," which, though it
was never published, I think was at least as good as any translation
which I have since executed, "however that may be." I very seriously
connected this Norse spirit with my grandfather and his stern uncles and
progenitors, who had fought in Canada and in the icy winters of New
England; grim men they were all; and I daresay that I was quite right. It
always seems to me that among these alternately fighting and farming
Icelanders I am among my Leland relatives; and I even once found Uncle
Seth in his red waistcoat in the Burnt Njals saga to the life. There was
a paragraph, as I write, recently circulating in the newspapers, in which
I was compared in appearance to an old grey Viking, and it gave me a
strange uncanny thrill, as if the writer of it were a wizard who had
revealed a buried secret.

My parents, on coming to Philadelphia, had at first attended the
Episcopal church, but finding that most of their New England friends held
to the Rev. W. H. (now Dr.) Furness, an Unitarian, they took a pew in his
chapel. After fifteen years they r