But a great deal more than Leif’s booths is involved. It is the discovery of the ancient city of Norumbega, of which also the inscribed tablet makes due record; including the statement, set forth more fully in the printed text, that the name is only an Indian transmutation of “Norbega, the ancient form of Norvega, Norway, to which Vinland was subject!” The name, though probably unfamiliar to most modern readers, was once as well known as that of Utopia, or El Dorado. One of Sir John Hawkins’ fellow-voyagers claimed to have seen the city of Norumbega still standing in 1568: a gorgeous Indian town outvying the capital of Montezuma, and resplendent in pearls and gold. Hakluyt proposed its recolonisation; Sir Humphrey Gilbert went in search of it; and it figures both as a city and a country on maps familiar to older generations than the founders of New England. Above all, Milton has given it a place in the Tenth Book of his _Paradise Lost_. When the Divine Creator is represented as readapting this world to a fallen race— Some say he bid his Angels turn askance The poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more From the sun’s axle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now from the north Of Norumbega, and the Samoed shore, Bursting their brazen dungeon, arm’d with ice, And snow, and hail, and stormy gust and flaw, Boreas . . . which seems to imply very Icelandic and Arctic associations of the Miltonic muse. But the gentle New England poet, Whittier, who had sung of his Christian knight in vain quest of the marvellous city, thus writes in sober prose to its modern discoverer: “I had supposed that the famed city of Norumbega was on the Penobscot when I wrote my poem some years ago; but I am glad to think of it as on the Charles, in our own Massachusetts.” This work of rearing anew on the banks of the river Charles the metropolis of Vinland the Good may be best entrusted to the poets of New England.