Whoever has beheld in the Berlin museum the little clay image of an old Norse goddess, can form a vivid conception of these odious little idols which the pious women hold on their laps, anointing them and warming them by the fire. Everything is admirable here; the old northern piety which leads the people to see a Balder in the puppet, with the same burning faith that in our day leads men and women of the people in the South to see the Queen of Heaven in another puppet, and the surrounding scenery with the smoking wood-pile in the centre and the drinking knights in the adjoining hall. A more modern poet with a lively appreciation of the coloring of time and locality would not have had the heart to alter the slightest trifle in such a scene; he would have viewed it as a treasure-trove. I do not speak of the realists; realists do not write romance cycles; I have in mind the great stylists among the poets of the present day. It is a scene which might have been introduced into Victor Hugo's "_La légende des siècles_" (The Legend of the Centuries); but still better adapted would it have been for so rigid an artist as Lecomte de Lisle, who might have interwoven it in his "Poèmes barbares." To Tegnér, however, this scenery only seemed rude, odious, wholly unavailable for poetic art. The sharp contrasts between barbaric and Hellenic poetry did not exist for him; he strove to the best of his endeavors to Hellenize his barbaric material. From principle he refrained from mingling the wild burlesque element with a pathetic or beautiful whole. Instead, he painted--and with profound art--a night in which the midnight sun stands high in the heavens; in which Balder's pyre, the symbol of the sun, bums on the consecrated stone, while pale priests, with silvery white beards, stand with flint-knives in their hands around the temple wall. The statue of Balder towers up on a pedestal, with Fridthjofs ring entwined about its arm, and the king, with his crown on his head, is busied about the altar. This scenery is far more beautiful than that of the saga, but it is abstract and much less individual. Besides the scandalous and burlesque elements in his material, there is a third thing which Tegnér recoils from and avoids. It is guilt.