Onward they glide,--and now I view Their iron-armed and stalwart crew; Joy glistens in each wild blue eye, Turned to green earth and summer sky. Each broad, seamed breast has cast aside Its cumbering vest of shaggy hide; Bared to the sun and soft warm air, Streams back the Northmen's yellow hair. I see the gleam of axe and spear, A sound of smitten shields I hear, Keeping a harsh and fitting time To Saga's chant, and Runic rhyme; Such lays as Zetland's Scald has sung, His gray and naked isles among; Or muttered low at midnight hour Round Odin's mossy stone of power. The wolf beneath the Arctic moon Has answered to that startling rune; The Gael has heard its stormy swell, The light Frank knows its summons well; Iona's sable-stoled Culdee Has heard it sounding o'er the sea, And swept, with hoary beard and hair, His altar's foot in trembling prayer! 'Tis past,--the 'wildering vision dies In darkness on my dreaming eyes! The forest vanishes in air, Hill-slope and vale lie starkly bare; I hear the common tread of men, And hum of work-day life again; The mystic relic seems alone A broken mass of common stone; And if it be the chiselled limb Of Berserker or idol grim, A fragment of Valhalla's Thor, The stormy Viking's god of War, Or Praga of the Runic lay, Or love-awakening Siona, I know not,--for no graven line, Nor Druid mark, nor Runic sign, Is left me here, by which to trace Its name, or origin, or place. Yet, for this vision of the Past, This glance upon its darkness cast, My spirit bows in gratitude Before the Giver of all good, Who fashioned so the human mind, That, from the waste of Time behind, A simple stone, or mound of earth, Can summon the departed forth; Quicken the Past to life again, The Present lose in what hath been, And in their primal freshness show The buried forms of long ago. As if a portion of that Thought By which the Eternal will is wrought, Whose impulse fills anew with breath The frozen solitude of Death, To mortal mind were sometimes lent, To mortal musings sometimes sent, To whisper--even when it seems But Memory's fantasy of dreams-- Through the mind's waste of woe and sin, Of an immortal origin! JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. This, in mere outline, is the story of Vinland, as told in the Icelandic Chronicle. Of its substantial accuracy there can be little doubt. Many proofs of Norse occupation have been found on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. The "skeleton in armor," however, which was unearthed in 1835 near Fall River, Mass., was probably that of an Indian. THE SKELETON IN ARMOR "Speak! speak! thou fearful guest! Who, with thy hollow breast Still in rude armor drest, Comest to daunt me! Wrapt not in Eastern balms, But with thy fleshless palms Stretched, as if asking alms, Why dost thou haunt me?"