You can see how very much unlike other Western poetry this poetry is.  The imagination indeed is of another race and another time than those to whose literary productions we have become accustomed.  But there is beauty here; and the strangeness of it indicates a possible literary value by which any literature may be more or less enriched.  Many are the particular episodes which rival the beauty and strangeness of the episode of Kullervo; and I wish that we could have time to quote them.  But I can only refer to them.  There is, for example, the legend of the invention of music, when the hero Wainamoinen (supposed to represent the Spirit of the Wind, and the sound of the name indicates the wailing of the wind) invents the first musical instrument.  In no other literature is there anything quite like this except in the Greek story of Orpheus.  Even as the trees bent down their heads to listen to the song of Orpheus, and as the wild beasts became tamed at the sound, and as the very stones of the road followed to the steps of the musician, so is it in the “Kalevala.”  But the Finnish Orpheus is the greater magician.  To hear him, the sun and moon come nearer to the earth, the waves of the sea stop short, bending their heads; the cataracts of the rivers hang motionless and silent; the fish raise their heads above the water.  And when he plays a sad melody, all nature weeps with him, even the trees and the stones and the little plants by the wayside.  And his own tears in falling become splendid pearls for the crowns of kings.

Then very wonderful too is the story of the eternal smith, Ilmarinen, who forged the foundations of the world, forged the mountains, forged the blue sky, so well forging them that nowhere can be seen the marks of the pincer, the marks of the hammer, the heads of the nails.  Working in his smithy we see him all grime and black; upon his head there is one yard deep of iron firing, upon his shoulders there is one fathom deep of soot—­the soot of the forge; for he seldom has time to bathe himself.  But when the notion takes him to get married, for the first time he bathes himself, and dresses himself handsomely, then he becomes the most beautiful of men.  In order to win his wife he is obliged to perform miracles of work; yet after he wins her she is killed by wild beasts.  Then he sets to work to forge himself a wife, a wife of silver, a bride of gold.  Very beautiful she is, but she has no heart, and she is always cold, and there is no comfort in her; even all the magic of the world-maker can not give her a warm heart.  But the work is so beautiful that he does not like to destroy it.  So he takes the wife of silver, the bride of gold, to the wisest of heroes, Wainamoinen, and offers her to him as a gift.  But the hero will have no such gift, “Throw her back into your forged fire, O Ilmarinen,” the hero makes answer—­“What greater folly, what greater sorrow can come upon man than to love a wife of silver, a bride of gold?”