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, {3} 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, to summerted, as he himself called it; and came back, if he ever came, in autumn to the women to help at harvest-time, with blood upon his hand.  But had he stayed at home, blood would have been there still.  Three out of four of them had been mixed up in some man-slaying, or had some blood-feud to avenge among their own kin.