Greenland, and Winland, goes on a
pilgrimage to Rome, to get, I presume, absolution from the Pope himself
for all the sins of her strange, rich, stormy, wayward life.

Have you not read--many of you surely have--La Motte Fouque's _Romance of
Sintram_? It embodies all that I would say. It is the spiritual drama
of that early middle age; very sad, morbid if you will, but true to fact.
The Lady Verena ought not, perhaps, to desert her husband, and shut
herself up in a cloister. But so she would have done in those old days.
And who shall judge her harshly for so doing? When the brutality of the
man seems past all cure, who shall blame the woman if she glides away
into some atmosphere of peace and purity, to pray for him whom neither
warnings nor caresses will amend? It is a sad book, _Sintram_. And yet
not too sad. For they were a sad people, those old Norse forefathers of
ours. Their Christianity was sad; their minsters sad; there are few
sadder, though few grander, buildings than a Norman church.

And yet, perhaps, their Christianity did not make them sad. It was but
the other and the healthier side of that sadness which they had as
heathens. Read which you will of the old sagas--heathen or
half-Christian--the Eyrbiggia, Viga Glum, Burnt Niall, Grettir the
Strong, and, above all, Snorri Sturluson's _Heimskringla_ itself--and you
will see at once how sad they are. There is, in the old sagas, none of
that enjoyment of life which shines out everywhere in Greek poetry, even
through its deepest tragedies. Not in complacency with Nature's beauty,
but in the fierce struggle with her wrath, does the Norseman feel
pleasure. Nature to him was not, as in Mr. Longfellow's exquisite poem,
{91} the kind old nurse, to take him on her knee and whisper to him, ever
anew, the story without an end. She was a weird witch-wife, mother of
storm demons and frost giants, who must be fought with steadily, warily,
wearily, over dreary heaths and snow-capped fells, and rugged nesses and
tossing sounds, and away into the boundless sea--or who could live?--till
he got hardened in the fight into ruthlessness of need and greed. The
poor strip of flat strath, ploughed and re-ploughed again in the short
summer days, would yield no more; or wet harvests spoiled the crops, or
heavy snows starved the cattle. And so the Norseman launched his ships
when the lands were sown in spring, and went forth to pillage or to
trade, as luck would have,