of the god sang to the king. I am afraid that you would be very
disappointed in some respects by the "Havamal." There is indeed a magical
song in it; and it is this magical song especially that Longfellow refers
to, a song of charms. But most of the "Havamal" is a collection of ethical
teaching. All that has been preserved by it has been published and
translated by Professors Vigfusson and Powell. It is very old--perhaps the
oldest Northern literature that we have. I am going to attempt a short
lecture upon it, because it is very closely related to the subject of
Northern character, and will help us, perhaps better than almost anything
else, to understand how the ancestors of the English felt and thought
before they became Christians. Nor is this all. I venture to say that the
character of the modern English people still retains much more of the
quality indicated by the "Havamal" than of the quality implied by
Christianity. The old Northern gods are not dead; they rule a very great
part of the world to-day.

The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about
them than any other kind of literature. And this sort of literature is
certainly among the oldest. It represents only the result of human
experience in society, the wisdom that men get by contact with each other,
the results of familiarity with right and wrong. By studying the proverbs
of a people, you can always make a very good guess as to whether you could
live comfortably among them or not.

Froude, in one of his sketches of travel in Norway, made the excellent
observation that if we could suddenly go back to the time of the terrible
sea-kings, if we could revisit to-day the homes of the old Northern
pirates, and find them exactly as they were one thousand or fifteen
hundred years ago, we should find them very much like the modern
Englishmen--big, simple, silent men, concealing a great deal of shrewdness
under an aspect of simplicity. The teachings of the "Havamal" give great
force to this supposition. The book must have been known in some form to
the early English--or at least the verses composing it (it is all written
in verse); and as I have already said, the morals of the old English, as
well as their character, differed very little from those of the men of the
still further North, with whom they mingled and intermarried freely, both
before and after the Danish conquest, when for one moment England and
Sweden were one kingdom.

Of co