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
reëchoed 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.