she has sworn to her lover unconquerably, submitting to the lowest humiliations; and although the recollection of the hardships she has suffered fills her heart, she is not revengeful, but interposes, vainly indeed, to save Gerlint, her tormentor, from the sword of Wate. But she does not scruple to be untruthful in telling Ortwin and Herwig, upon the seashore, before they recognize her, that she is dead; and though we may think stratagem not unjustifiable toward her Norman captors, she undertakes rather too joyfully the deceptions which lead to the capture of the citadel.

To us, I think, Gudrun, like the Nibelungen Lied, will be principally interesting as a portrayal of our forefathers. In Gudrun the picture is far less plain than in the companion epic, since it is much more overlaid by accretions from the after ages. A fine, picturesque heathenism, however, does look through; and often in the verse we seem to hear the roar of the broad, tempestuous seas, in battle with which the children of the ancient race still take pleasure. "Both poems," says a high authority, "are to the nation an everlasting glory. They reach across, as it were, into those old times, with their deeds, customs, and ideas, out of which the voices of discontented Roman enemies extolled the bravery, the trustiness, the chastity of our venerable ancestors. When we behold these poems, full of healthy strength, of sturdy although rude ideas, of noble morals, we hear quite other testimonies speak for the ancestral excellences of our stock than the dry declarations of the chroniclers; and, in germ,

we shall already, among our fathers, find the honor, the considerateness, and all the creditable qualities which distinguish us to-day in the circle of European nations."1

"To characterize in the shortest way," says another critic," the Nibelungen Lied, let me recall a scene from the Alpine world. Bursting forth from the blue glacier grottos of the Finster Aarhorn, the river Aar flows, at first quietly and gently, past the Grimsel, upon a broad expanse which it murmuringly traverses. But the colossal mountains to the right and left press constantly closer upon it. Masses of granite tower before the current; its course becomes always more tortuous; ever wilder grows the roar in the narrow channel; ever quicker hurry on the foaming waves; ever gloomier threaten the countless crags and precipices; until at length, in mad career and with fearful thunder-crash, the stream plunges headlong into the gloomy gulf of Handeck." The student of the Nibelungen Lied, who at the same time knows the Alps, will recognize the excellence of the scholar's parallel; and if I were to search for an apt symbol of the Gudrun, it might be found in others of those mountain streams, which, after the torture of cataracts and the smothering of sunless abysses, flow forth at length among the trees and grass of laughing lowland plains, at first tumult and despair, then the fairest peace.

2

1 Gervinus: Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung.

2 Joh. Scherr.

When the voyager approaches the shore of the Old World, and sees at length the iron-bound Irish coast, ledges of granite, seamed and battered so long by the sledges of the surf, the scream of the sea-bird meanwhile answering the wild wind, he will behold the little vessels of the fishermen, the hulls scarcely visible, the brown sails bellying to the breeze, while the mast leans far to the leeward. In guise very similar did the three heroes of Friesland, -Wate, Frut, and Horant, carry off over these seas the fair Hilda, their little barks of osiers covered with hide and bound with thongs, the sails always wet with foam from the near-at-hand waves. So must have looked our pirate progenitors, of whom these figures are representative. Out from the German ocean the blast blew strong against us, bleak and full of snow, it was the end of winter, as we pressed on past Normandy, the old realm of Hartmuth, into the wider sea. It was a sea full of gales and mist,- a tossing, whitening surface, beneath a sky overcast. sky overcast. Of the distant shore the sunken coast-line barely remained visible, now and then a low island, desolate, with its white sand,perhaps the Wulpensand. At night the storm grew wilder, a murky darkness, which a solitary beacon far down amid the waters did not relieve. At noon we anchored off a wintry shore, a slow, gray river pouring out ice-masses, the beach heaped high with snow. Among these scenes the barefooted. Gudrun came to wash the clothes, while she watched for the messengers whom the sea-bird had promised. Spots they are bleak and dangerous to-day; nurs

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ing in that old time the hardihood that gave the sailor-races their dominion in the world; not wilder the roar of the blasts than their own battlecries, not more relentless the dash of their tides. than the stroke of their axes, not darker the heavens than the movements of their spirits; yet with traits in them too of manful virtue.

Before we leave the consideration of the poetry which the people loved, a class of legends must be noticed, — like those of the Nibelungen Lied and Gudrun, for a long period transmitted orally, and at the same time with them committed, at length, to writing. Allusion is made to the Animal Legends,1 a class peculiarly racy with the life of the Teutons, which have kept pace and place with the stock throughout its whole progress, and are yet in fresh remembrance. The roots of these legends lie in the wild simplicity of the oldest races. Such a people fastens passionately upon the phenomena of nature, rejoicing with spring and summer, lamenting with autumn, bowed down in the heavy imprisonment of winter. With ready anthropomorphism it lends to these changes its own human feelings, developing with the personification colossal myths, sometimes pleasant, sometimes fearful. Still more intimately does such a race connect itself with the more closely related animal world. One of Hawthorne's most charming characters is the weird creature, Donatello, the faun; and no picture in which he appears is quite so attractive as

1 Thiersagen.

GUDRUN.

9hiversity c

MICHIGAN

that one of the solitary Roman garden, in which Donatello disports himself, communing in strange sympathy with the brute world. He whistles to the birds in their own notes, who flock to him fearlessly; with beasts he enters into similar relations of mutual confidence. He is himself harmlessly happy, and makes happy the wild creatures, who, feeling his likeness to themselves, take part in his gambols and respond to his advances. We may hold that man has a nobler origin than development from some brutish type; yet, as we trace him backward into his primeval state, he becomes more and more faun-like, until there comes to pass something of that community of feeling between him and the brute world that Hawthorne pictures. The animal legend can arise only among a primeval people, who are still hunters or herdsmen. These see in the ravenous wolf a powerful companion, strong and skilful almost as themselves; in the grim bear, a hero ruling wood and heath. As they wander through the dim depths and sunny glades of the undisturbed forest, wolf and bear, and the redbearded fox lurking at the wood's edge, are hunters like themselves, companions, and receive, besides their own brute names, familiar titles, Isengrim, Brun, Reinhart. Shepherd and hunter felt that it was good to be on friendly terms, in those solitudes, with these forest comrades. Not alone were their teeth and claws formidable. In the lithe form the primitive man believed a demon was lurking; in the wolf-soul, shining forth from the anger-sparkling eyes, there was something un