natural growth of the simple ideality of conception. The Northern character at the present day has very different qualities. Though renowned for philosophical and metaphysical prose, yet their poetry they require to deal with realities and not with ideas; it must be clear as a fountain, and any opaqueness is an inexcusable flaw. They are yet in the infancy of literature, and the imagination is still more sensuous than acute and subtle. However much they court abstractions in prose, in verse they love only the actual, the real, the tangible. Nature, and not metaphysics, are the subjects of their poetry, and they still preserve a freshness and simplicity reminding of more ancient and ruder days, delightful amidst the hair-splitting of most modern poetry. Their infancy is like the infancy of all national literatures, peculiarly modified by the advanced state of civilization in which their birth was thrown. At first sight there seems something unnatural and unaccountable in this apparent contradiction in the character of the nation, manifested respectively in their prose and their poetry. But on farther examination all becomes clear as a spring day. Their prose was, as their whole literature might and should have been, contemporary with their civilization through its various phases. Metaphysics is the last refinement, or rather, corruption, which national literature undergoes. Their prose had naturally arrived at this stage when the true poetic feeling woke for the first time. And in spite of the rational tendencies of the age, it assumed that character of warm, bodily imagination which marks all early literatures. The tendency to the mysterious and the superhuman has mostly vanished, and more vivid conceptions of every thing have, under their Christian development, taken the place of dim magic and weird creations. Northern poets still delight in dealing with those wonderful poetical inventions of their own ancient mythology, and revel among the elves and dwarfs that surround the bosoms of mountains and woods. Lif, with her golden hair, Gerda, with cheeks like auroras, the cunning Loke, with his mixture of guile, wickedness and deceit, Thor's mighty Mjoelner, and the mead-horns of Walhalla--from among these wonderful beings, they have culled with a careless hand, and every sprig and flower is radiant with poetic beauty. The taste for old legends and traditions has revived within a few years, and scholars and antiquarians are now laying open unknown mines of treasure. A TRUE ROMANCE.