THE POETRY OF THE NORTH.

THE Democratic Review not long since contained a singularly wild and
spirited poem, entitled the Norseman's Ride, in which the writer appears
to have very happily blended the boldness and sublimity of the heathen
saga with the grace and artistic skill of the literature of civilization.
The poetry of the Northmen, like their lives, was bold, defiant, and full
of a rude, untamed energy. It was inspired by exhibitions of power
rather than of beauty. Its heroes were beastly revellers or cruel and
ferocious plunderers; its heroines unsexed hoidens, playing the ugliest
tricks with their lovers, and repaying slights with bloody revenge,--very
dangerous and unsatisfactory companions for any other than the fire-
eating Vikings and redhanded, unwashed Berserkers. Significant of a
religion which reverenced the strong rather than the good, and which
regarded as meritorious the unrestrained indulgence of the passions, it
delighted to sing the praises of some coarse debauch or pitiless
slaughter. The voice of its scalds was often but the scream of the
carrion-bird, or the howl of the wolf, scenting human blood:--

"Unlike to human sounds it came;
Unmixed, unmelodized with breath;
But grinding through some scrannel frame,
Creaked from the bony lungs of Death."

Its gods were brutal giant forces, patrons of war, robbery, and drunken
revelry; its heaven a vast cloud-built ale-house, where ghostly warriors