But should one cross the Rhine and live among that folk on the other side, so old in their civilization, so keenly alive, who have suffered in the search for freedom, and are so capable of abandoning all for a lofty ideal; when one considers Paris, that queen among the cities in beauty and in tragedy, her people scintillating with intellect and an opalescent life always varying, then one is inclined to say, "Take all, but leave us France, the right eye of the world!" And yet, should one cross to little Switzerland and little Holland, where one knows one stands on ground made sacred in past ages as the battle-ground where mighty empires which sought to crush freedom were repelled, and studies that virile folk, one is inclined to exclaim, "There would be nothing more grand than to belong to one of these small heroic great peoples," and one thanks the gods they have existed. Yet, further, if one turns to the northern peninsulas where in their greatest purity are to be found our fair northern races, and where the sons of the Sea Kings seem to have retained into these later times among their fjords and frozen forests much of the charm and freshness which we dream of as belonging to our own old northern ancestors, a charm which lives for ever in their great northern Saga, the loftiest song of battle and the deepest of the love of man and woman that the world has heard, one is not surprised that sons of Scandinavia send out into the world to-day works of genius which conquer its thought as their forefathers conquered the bodies of the men of the ancient world; one feels that, were the Scandinavian race obliterated, a northern aurora would have faded.[4] [4] If I were compelled to name the most poetical and completely ideal human creature I have met in the course of somewhat complex travels, I should name a Swede whom I once met in Italy. While, if one turns one's eyes to the great northland in whose people Europe and Asia mingle, and studies their strangely virile and intense literature and their characters, in which the lion and the lamb are so strangely blended, and men willing to die rather than exercise any form of force towards their fellows are found side by side with those who know of no governing power but the knout; when one watches this great, strange, strong, gentle, fierce folk, so yet unexhausted, one is strangely drawn towards it and compelled to recognize that the Russian is not merely physically but intellectually one of the mighty modifying forces of the future.