For all that, Bjoern with his rough speech and hearty delight in fighting and drinking, is far truer to the spirit of the old heroic age than is Frithjof with his sentimentality and lovesick reveries. This verse, for instance, is replete with the briny breath of the northern main. The north wind blows through it: "Good is the sea, your complaining you squander, Freedom and joy on the sea flourish best. He never knoweth effeminate rest Who on the billows delighteth to wander. When I am old, to the green-growing land I, too, will cling, with the grass for my pillow. Now I will drink and will fight with free hand, Now I'll enjoy my own sorrow-free billow." I might continue in the autobiographical vein; but must forbear. For there is a period in the life of every young Norseman when, untroubled by its anachronism, he glories in Frithjof's melancholy mooning, his praise of Ingeborg, his misanthropy, and all the manifold moods of love so enchantingly expressed in Tegner's melodious verse. When a book acquires this significance as an expression of the typical experience in the lives of thousands, the critical muse can but join in the general chorus, and find profound reasons for the universal praise. In the case of "Frithjof's Saga" this is not a difficult matter. From beginning to end the poem has a lyrical intensity which sets the mind vibrating with a responsive emotion. It is not a coldly impersonal epic, recounting remote heroic events; but there is a deeply personal note in it, which has that nameless moving quality--_la note emue_, as the French call it--which brings the tear to your eye, and sends a delicious breeze through your nerves. All that, to be sure, or nearly all of it, evaporates in translation; for no more than you can transfer the exquisite dewy intactness of the lily to canvas can you transfer the rapturous melody of noble verse into an alien tongue. The subtlest harmonies--those upon which the thrill depends--are invariably lost. If Longfellow, instead of giving us two cantos, had translated the whole poem, we should, at least, have possessed an English version which would have afforded us some conception of the charm of the renowned original.