detested slavery, but he was the grand champion of the Constitution; before this, as before some sacred goddess, he planted himself, in full armor clad, and whoever came in hostile guise against her, from whatever quarter under the sun, at him Webster aimed the mighty blows of that battleaxe, which neither a Goliah could shiver nor a Delilah steal. His youth had been spent in the study of the Constitution, his middle age in its exposition and defence; when now he had entered the vale of years, it was too late for him to learn the novel creed of a new party. He never failed to acknowledge slavery to be a curse; but all his life long he had loved and venerated, with a religious love and a holy veneration, the sanctity and integrity of the American Union. To his mind a rendition of fugitive slaves was necessary to fulfil the obligations of the Constitution, and to preserve the bond of the United States; on the other hand, the doctrines of extreme abolition threatened to sever the links of this priceless chain. Perhaps a legal or a logical mind would find it hard to controvert his arguments; and we have had an awful proof of the correctness of his foresight. Moreover, at the time when he delivered his speeches and cast his votes, it is probable, nay certain, that these speeches and these votes expressed the sentiments not only of a vast majority of the country, but even of a vast majority in his own section of the country.

And is not this enough to justify him as a statesman? It is sound American doctrine that the will of the people is law; and the best and perhaps the greatest statesman is he who, adopting the will of the people, which with us is always imperative, guides and conducts it with the greatest energy, sagacity, and success. If, in 1850, Daniel Webster had adopted the creed of New England abolition, he would have been a reformer, but not a statesman; but God had made him astatesman and not a reformer. Let us be plainly understood as wishing to defend him, and not to approve his course considered by itself. On the contrary, it pains us much to record that he should have advocated fugitive slave laws; but it also pains us vastly more that the Constitution of the land should have been such that a man so great, so wise, and so good as he should have found or felt it a duty to advocate such laws, for we do believe that he was conscientious in this business. Let those who wish to see how these points presented themselves to his mind read his able speech in reply to the pernicious Calhoun, which he delivered in the Senate,

March 7, 1850 a speech which he delivered with sadness at his heart, because he felt bound to express his conscientious convictions upon so momentous a topic, although at the time of so doing he had given up all hopes of rallying a party of adherents. In his own words: "He had made up his mind to embark alone on what he was aware would prove a stormy sea, because in that case, should final disaster ensue, there would be but one life lost."

We are very sorry that Webster has no right to connect his name with the abolition of slavery. It is our opinion, though we know many profess to think differently, that he would have had this honor had he survived to this day. But we do say and sincerely feel that in this day of Union triumph his name should be great in the land as the most distinguished, able, and influential civil defender of the Union that it has ever had; and we do protest against the maltreatment which his name and fame have received in many instances. When the officers and soldiers of General Grant's armies were still boys at school, those sentiments and principles for which they have been so nobly fighting and dying were then instilled into their spirits by the Union speeches of Daniel Webster, scattered throughout the land, and rehearsed with boyish vehemence in the schools, and by the words of fathers and mothers who heard and loved the great patriot, and drew inspiration from his lips to transmit it to their own offspring. That offspring should recognise its debt.

ART. III.-Les Eddas traduits des anciens iáomes scandinaves, par MLLE. DU PUGET. Paris, 1846.

2. Poèms Islandais, tirés de l'Edda de Saemund. Paris, 1858.

3. Geschichte der deutschen Religion Von W. MULLER. Goetting, 1844.

4. Ueber Odins Verehrung in Deutschland. Erlangen, 1822.

5. Les Germains avant le Christianssme. Paris, 1847.

6. Eddalæren og dens Oprindelse. Copenhagen, 1856.

The exquisite fragments of many classic authors whose works are, with the exception of a few tantalizing relics, lost to us forever, are just sufficient to render it difficult for us

to regard with charity the blind and savage ignorance of those who robbed mankind of such masterpieces of ancient wisdom, poetry, and eloquence. It is hard to forgive Caliph Omar for the exhibition of self-complacent bigotry by which he,

"Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away,

Richer than all his tribe,"

and consigned to the flames one of the greatest treasures the world ever contained. If it be true, as Milton intimates, that the sin of making away with a good book is as great as that of killing a man, the fierce Saracen, by causing the destruction of the library at Alexandria, added to his list of evil deeds the most prodigious crime of all. But we must console ourselves with the reflection that the library was burned, as some hundred thousand martyrs have been, with the best intentions, and that, although ignorance has destroyed much, it has also preserved not a little. Many an ancient manuscript escaped the flames into which it would have been thrust by the hands it fell into had their owner known that it was written by a pagan-by a Pliny, for instance, or some other such persecutor and wholesale executioner of Christians; and many a pious scholar, who carefully preserved and transcribed classic manuscripts was, perhaps,visited at times by conscientious scruples at the idea of being instru mental in perpetuating heathen lore, however excellent in style and gratifying to his love of learning and natural beauty. So that, when we consider how much time and decay have necessarily effaced; how much ignorance and bigotry have obliterated; how much the Goth, the Vandal, the Turk, and other barbarians, and even Christians, have mutilated and burned, the marvel with us is not that so little, but that so much, of the literature of the ancients escaped annihilation.

The most ancient literature of the Scandinavians, upon which we have a sort of family claim, was preserved in a manner equally miraculous. It travelled far, was lost sight of, and would have perished altogether had it not at last found an asylum amid the volcanic rocks and barren wastes of a region which offered neither glory nor plunder sufficient to allure the wildest conqueror. Its origin is Asiatic, aud many of its mythological and cosmogonic poems are doubtless of great antiquity. Being orally preserved, these poems may, in the lapse of ages, have suffered some adulteration; but their sublime simplicity, and genuine symbolism contrast so favorably with the tortuous affectation and elaborate ver

bosity of the Scandinavian skalds, or verse-smiths (jódasmidir) of later date, that they appear to have come down to us in their pristine purity. We allude to the poems of the Elder Edda. In Great Britain and on the continent of Europe, these and corresponding lays were wholly lost. The memory of them, although it had lived so long and faithfully in the minds of thousands, was dissipated by the light of Christianity, and, in a comparatively brief period, all that remained of the system that had once inspired the deeds of millions. were a few names, some obscure and distorted legends, and the indelible moral impress they had made upon the genius of the Saxon and Scandinavian people. After the worshippers of Thor and Odin had forgotten their old deities and faith, and had purified their recollection of the lofty strains of the Völuspá and the mysterious effusions of Bragi; after Asa-Thor had been transformed into St. Michael the archangel, the goddess Freyja into the Virgin Mary, the god Vali into St. Valentine or St. Paul the archer, who fought throughout the morning and prayed all the afternoon; after all the pagan names and festivals had been obliterated by Christian substitutes, and the divinities of Valhalla had been stigmatized as demons, the Eddaic literature seemed to be not only dead and buried, but without the hope of resurrection.

But in a country almost the counterpart of the giant's home, or the outer world, so graphically pictured in the Eddas and Sagas, a refuge was still found for the skald. In Iceland, in the dreary land of eternal snow, volcanic eruption, boiling hot spouting geysers, and earthquakes, he was still a welcome guest in every house, and enlivened the long winter evenings with his alliterative recitations. Bigotry was never a very prominent feature in the Icelandic character, and it had outgrown paganism before it received Christianity. The change did not, therefore, produce a powerful "revulsion of feeling," or such a "holy horror" of the forsaken faith as to expose all its relics to destruction. The conversion of the Icelanders to Christianity was, it is said, effected by means of an embargo laid on their vessels by Olaf, king of Norway, and was, as might naturally be inferred. from its facility, of a superficial character. The transition was not great; it was more nominal than real, and the form of Christianity they accepted was only elevated a few degrees above their former superstition. They continued to retain in some shape or other many of their ethnical ideas and practices, and, in consequence of the lenity of their

church government, too far from its head to be subject to much control, they were little interfered with, and the knowledge of letters their priesthood and laymen acquired, was fortunately employed in preserving the learning of their heathen ancestors, as well as in inculcating the precepts of the Christain religion. During their long dark winters they had ample leisure for the work, and numerous copies of the poems of the Elder or Poetic Edda, either transcribed from Runic manuscripts and Runic staves, or, more probably, collected from oral tradition, were made Icelandic by skalds. priests, and even Christian bishops.

In the year one thousand, A. D., the Christian religion was established in Iceland. In the same century a school was founded and Latin books were introduced there, and a few years later Sæmund Sigfusson the Learned collected the thirty-nine poems which constitute the Poetic or Elder Edda. As the subsequent centuries elapsed, the loss of their inde pendence, the devastation of their land by a succession of frightful volcanic eruptions, and the strict teachings of the Reformation, extinguished the spirit of the Icelandic skalds, and the race gradually became extinct. But their lore was still preserved, and, as the old Norse tongue continued to be spoken in its purity by the Icelanders, they were still able to beguile the time and relieve the tedium of their long gloomy winters by reading the strange, quaint heathen stories contained in their smoky old manuscripts, even as they now entertain themselves with the poetical version of Christian cosmogony and theology found in John Thorláksson's translation of Milton's "Paradise Lost." In 162S, Arngrim Johnsen discovered a parchment copy of the Prose Edda, an abstract of, and commentary upon, the Poetic Edda, and about ten years afterward Bryniulf Svendsen, Bishop of Iceland, found parchment copies of both Eddas, and sent them to the Royal Library at Copenhagen. Every cabin in Iceland has since been ransacked for parchments, and the search has been rewarded with the discovery of numerous skaldic lays and sagas that have thrown a flood of light upon the mythology and history of Northern Europe; which the writings of Diaconus, Adam of Bremen, and Saxo Grammaticus, the only previously recognised authorities on the subject, had rendered so obscure and doubtful.

The Eddaic poems are all written in alliterative verse. They are divided into strophes, which commonly consist of eight lines or four couplets. The former line of each couplet