one who had even understood the idea of an epic of this kind.  The peasants did not know.  They only had the fragments of the whole; parts of the poem existed in one province, parts in another; no Finnish musician had ever known the whole.  The whole may have been made first by Loennrot.  At all events he was the Homer of the “Kalevala,” and it was fortunate for Finland that he happened to be himself both a scholar and a poet—­qualifications seldom united in the same person.

What is the “Kalevala” as we now possess it?  It is an epic, but not like any other epic in the world, for the subject of it is Magic.  We might call it the Epic of Magic.  It is the story of how the world and the heaven and the sun and the moon and the stars, the elements and the races of living creatures and all other things were created by magic; also how the first inhabitants of the world lived, and loved, and fought.  But there is another thing to be said in a general was about this magic.  The magic of “Kalevala” is not like anything else known by that name in European literature.  The magic of “Kalevala” is entirely the magic of words.  These ancient people believed in the existence of words, by the utterance of which anything might be accomplished.  Instead of buying wood and hiring carpenters, you might build a house by uttering certain magical words.  If you had no horse and wanted to travel rapidly, you could make a horse for yourself out of bits of bark and old sticks by uttering over them certain magical words.  But this was not all.  Beings of intellect, men and women, whole armies of men, in fact, might be created in a moment by the utterance of these mystical words.  There is the real subject of the “Kalevala.”

I told you that the epic is not like anything else in European literature and not like anything else in the world as to the subject.  But this is not the case as regards the verse.  The verse is not like Japanese verse, indeed, but it comes nearer to it than any other European verse does.  Of course even in Finnish verse, accents mean a great deal, and accent means nothing at all in Japanese verse.  But I imagine something very much like Finnish verse might be written in Japanese, provided that in reciting it a slight stress is thrown on certain syllables.  Of course you know something about Longfellow’s “Hiawatha”—­such lines as these: 

  And the evening sun descending
  Set the clouds on fire with redness,
  Burned the broad sky like a prairie,
  Left upon the level water
  One long track and trail of splendour,
  Down whose stream, as down a river,
  Westward, westward Hiawatha
  Sailed into the fiery sunset,
  Sailed into the purple vapours,
  Sailed into the dusk of evening.