There is a wonderful affinity between the Scotch and the Norwegians and Swedes, especially in their traditionary literature, which marks a common origin and common customs at some remote period. We find among the genuine Scotch ballads many that are almost literal versions of the same Scandinavian legends no less indigenous in their own land. A large number of the most beautiful Scotch ballads plainly point to an extraneous Northern origin, and their exact counterparts in form, ideas, and words, we find circulating as popular songs among the Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian peasantry. These may often be traced back centuries, at the end of which they seem still to be as old and as thoroughly implanted in their native soil as they now seem. They have been sung from mouth to mouth, with the same wild old melodies and the same quaint language, as they were sung centuries ago among the scenes they so faithfully depict. The characteristics we have so briefly alluded to as marking the two classes of nations, namely, mysterious grandeur among the Northmen, and among the Greeks ideality, grandness, and vividness of conception, might by skillful hands be traced in more modern times under the influence of an ever-changing and growing civilization. I will only allude, in passing, to a few prominent points. The literature of Greece, as we know it, had already reached its hight, two thousand years before our time. It was already gray with years before the North had begun its infancy. Homer is the boundary which is insurmountably opposed to our further retrospection, and Homer is already the beginning of perfection in Greek letters. Of earlier periods we can but conjecture that there must have been such, bearing a character analogous to the relics of those nations whose fabulous history is better known to us. Northern literature can hardly be said to have had an existence till within the last hundred years. Before that time we must look for all phases of progress and germs of progress in the physical and animal character of the nation, their social and political features and relations. The vividness and ideality of the ancients find their natural change in the more purely impassioned style of more modern Southern poetry. Their creations have naturally lost with the fall of paganism, the supernatural endowments they had, and retaining in some their ideality, they have hightened and fired the human nature they depict by the addition of wilder and more flaming passions, of love that consumes, and ambition, revenge, and hatred that destroy. Thus we again obtain consistent characters governed by human laws, but raised above the ordinary mass of men by different qualities from those which ennobled ideal creations among the ancients. Repose still constitutes greatness in some instances; but the inner man is made all fire, and seething metal, ever-burning and quenchless. Elevation and subtlety of ideas naturally follow these causes, they are another