Down in yon watery nook,
    Where bearded mists divide,
  The gray old gods that Chaos knew,
    The sires of Nature, hide.

  Aloft, in secret veins of air,
    Blows the sweet breath of song;
  Ah! few to scale those uplands dare,
    Though they to all belong.

  See thou bring not to field or stone
    The fancies found in books;
  Leave authors’ eyes, and fetch your own,
    To brave the landscape’s looks.

  And if, amid this dear delight,
    My thoughts did home rebound,
  I should reckon it a slight
    To the high cheer I found.

  Oblivion here thy wisdom is,
    Thy thrift the sleep of cares;
  For a proud idleness like this
    Crowns all life’s mean affairs.

* * * * *

THE GERMAN POPULAR LEGEND OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS.

We doubt whether any popular legend has ever taken deeper root among the common people and spread farther in the world than the story of Dr. Faustus and his reckless compact with the Evil One.  We do not intend to compare it, of course, to those ancient traditions which seem to have constituted a tie of relationship between the most distant nations in times anterior to history.  These are mostly of a mythological character,—­as, for instance, those referring to the existence of elementary spirits.  Their connection with mankind has, in the earliest times, occupied the imagination of the most widely different races.  A certain analogy we can easily explain by the affinity of human hearts and human minds.  But when we find that exactly the same tradition is reechoed by the mountains of Norway and Sweden in the ballad of “Sir Olaf and the Erl-king’s Daughter,” which the milkmaid of Brittany sings in the lay of the “Sieur Nann and the Korigan,” and in a language radically different from the Norse,—­when, here and there, the same forms of superstition meet us in the ancient popular poetry of the Servians and modern Greeks, which were familiar to the Teutonic and Cambrian races of early centuries,—­must we not believe in a primeval intimate connection between distant nations? are we not compelled to acknowledge that there must have existed, in those remote times, means of communication unknown to us?

We repeat, however, that, in calling the legend of Dr. Faustus the most widely-spread we know of, we cannot allude to these primitive traditions, the circulation of which is perfectly mysterious.  We speak of such popular legends as admit of their origin being traced.  Among these the Faustus-tradition may be called comparatively new.  To us Americans, indeed, whose history commences only with the modern history of Europe, a period of three hundred years seems quite a respectable space of time.  But to the Germans and the Scandinavians, from whose popular lore the names of Horny Siegfried and Dietric of Berne, (Theodoric the Great,) and of Roland, are not yet completely erased, a story of the sixteenth century must appear comparatively modern.