which threatens them. The terms of the game are employed throughout this canto in a series of equivoques, which seem to us in bad taste; yet, through all this playing on words, we gather that the young hero's sullen determination is inflexible. But we soon find him holding an interview with Ingeborg, within the precincts of a temple, where she had been placed by her brother for protection. It is the temple of the golden-haired Balder, the Apollo of Northern mythology, the god of eloquence. Innocent as is the love of the young couple, such an interview in such a sacred spot is a sin in the superstitious belief of the times, and Ingeborg trembles while she listens to the accents of her lover. There is a passage here which betrays too plainly that the Swedish poet is not unacquainted with the tender parting of Romeo and Juliet.

"Hark! 't is the lark! no! 't is the dove,

I know that plaintive murmur still;

The lark still sleeps beside his love
In his warm nest on yonder hill.

"But see! that light! no! 't is not day;
'Tis but the bale-fire in the east."

The lovers separate; but we next find Ingeborg awaiting the return of Frithiof from a royal council, to which, under the softening influence of his last interview with her, he had once more repaired. All night had she waited to learn her fate from his lips, and during those weary hours of suspense, many a bitter thought had passed through her pure mind. To her timid eyes the awful countenance of the statue had seemed to frown upon their interview, through the shades of the preceding night; she trembles in the consciousness of having offended a benevolent deity; and in the sincerity of her penitence, she determines that if her brother be inexorable still, she will sacrifice her happiness to duty. Scarcely has this high resolve been formed, when Frithiof returns, his dark eye and pale cheek announcing their doom ere he speaks. He had so far mastered his own proud spirit as again to demand the hand of Ingeborg from Helge, offering him at the same time his assistance in the approaching contest with King Ring. Helge, without deigning to turn on him his stern forbidding eye, had declared that the maid might be given to the son of a bondé, but never to the man who dared profane the temple of Balder; and demanded a direct answer to the question, whether he had not there held an in

terview with Ingeborg. The youth fearlessly acknowledges the truth, and is interrupted by wild cries from the throng around, once his zealous admirers; those near him start back as if they had seen a plague spot on his brow, and the triumphant Helge pronounces instant sentence. He commands the indignant culprit to sail forthwith for a distant isle in the west, there to collect the tribute which its fierce yarl or earl had been accustomed to pay to King Bele, but which had been discontinued since that sovereign's decease.

It is with these tidings that Frithiof returns to Ingeborg; and then with impetuosity urges her flight with him. Carrying with them a handful of earth from the graves of their dead fathers, - a beautiful touch of filial piety in his fiery character, - he proposes that they should seek the placid seas and beautiful isles of Greece, which he had heard described by his parent, and there lead a life of unearthly felicity. There is great poetical beauty in the sketch of these unseen lovely climes from the lips of the young Norzeman; and beauty of a still higher kind in the firmness with which Ingeborg resists his intreaties. She considers herself bound to regard her brother as clothed with all the rights of her deceased father. But the cruel struggle between this rigid sense of duty, and an attachment which had grown up innocently from childhood in her heart, is obvious; and when the lover, incensed that even she should thwart his schemes of happiness, bids her an angry adieu, the whole tenderness of her nature breaks out with a simple and touching pathos. His resentment is at once quenched by her tears; and finding the heroic girl not to be moved from her upright purpose, he parts from her with attachment strengthened tenfold, as it ever must be in such cases, by reverence for her conscientiousness; valuing her love far more because he finds she is not the mere creature of impulse, like himself, but that dignified, half-divine being, a woman of principle, one who asks but "what is right?" and does it, cost what it may.

We then have Ingeborg's Lament, which disappointed us; perhaps only because the feelings having just been highly wrought, no uttered lament could affect us so powerfully as an image left in our minds of resigned, hopeless, silent sorrow. The next canto, called " Frithiof at Sea," is full of the wildness of legendary lore. Helge, by his incantations on the beach, summons the demons of Arctic tempests to pursue the hated lover of his sister. The storm is described in spirited verses,

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perpetually varying in measure. At last, Frithiof, suspecting fiendish interference with his voyage, looks from the masthead.

"But what strikes his vision, thus swimming so fast?
Lo! a whale, like an island broke loose, rushes past!
Upon its broad back two fell demons are seen,
While still o'er the whale dash those billows of green.
Heid bears the rude shape of a monstrous ice-bear,
He shakes snows around while his eye-balls fierce glare;
And Ham there appears in a huge eagle's form,

He flaps his vast wings, and more rough blows the storm." Frithiof instantly gives orders, not to his crew, but to his ship!

"If thou art Agir's child,

With thy keel sharp and true,
Cut me that whale in two!"

Ellide obeys; Frithiof pierces the sinking fiends with his arrows; the storm is lulled; ship and billows, mountain and sky, smile beneath the "broad golden eye of the sun," and an island of massy rocks and green hillocks appears before him. We are sorry that our poet describes his hero as bearing to the shore eight of his exhausted seamen at once! Barbarous nations prize bone and muscle not a little, and with good cause; the heroes of fable are always semi-giants; but we can hardly forgive our modern bard for presenting such an undignified and grotesque image as an illustration of Frithiof's physical efficiency.

For the sake of his brave father Thorsten, an old friend of the yarl, Frithiof is treated with much honor by the chieftain in his "silver helmet " and ample mantle,

"With richest stars embroider'd bright;

Of purple velvet was the ground,
The lining was of ermine white."

After wintering with Angantyr, our young warrior receives from him a purse of gold, not as tribute to the sons of Bele, but as a mark of personal regard for himself; and sails on his return under the blue skies of spring. The description of his approach to the familiar shore is fine, but too long for quotation. He beholds the dome of Balder's temple with emotion, and his falcon comes flying from its roof to settle on his arm.

But

His

when he doubles the rocky point, and looks for his own mansion, on the well known height stands only a "dark and murky pile." He lands to gaze upon a scene of desolation. dog bounds upon his breast, and his milk-white steed gallops toward him,

"And seeks as whilome in his hand for food; but neither wall nor roof is to be seen in all his once fertile domain; the winds still sport with the ashes of his home. The silver-haired Hilding comes slowly forward to explain the dreary mystery. King Ring had fought a battle with the Swedish princes, in which the gay Halfdan had distinguished himself by his bravery; but the Norwegian had conquered; and as King Helge in his flight had passed Framnaes, he had wantonly and malignantly fired the residence of the absent Frithiof. Then, to secure peace, he had yielded his sister, and Ingeborg had been borne away, the bride of the veteran Ring.

Frithiof forgets for a moment his wrongs at the hand of Helge, in his indignation at Ingeborg; but the old man paints to him the holy submission and deep wo with which, to save her country, she had given herself as a victim at the altar; and the brutality with which, even at that solemn hour, Helge had torn from her arm a bracelet, the parting gift of Frithiof, and placed it on the statue of Balder. The feelings of the impetuous youth rush into another channel. The next canto, commencing,

"The midnight sun on the mountain rests,

Its disk of a bloody hue;

It is not night, it is not day,

But something between the two,"

is one of the most spirited in the poem. Frithiof bursts

"With his soul on fire,

And speech like an autumn storm,"

upon the rites which Helge is celebrating in the temple of Balder; dashes the purse of gold into the king's face and fells him to the ground, threatens the priests,

"Those wan old men with their silver beards,
And knives in their bloody hands,"

and in attempting to tear the bracelet from the arm of the idol, VOL. XXVIII. 3D S. VOL. X. NO. III.

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brings down the vast statue upon the blazing altar. It burns; the flames are communicated to the temple, and Frithiof vainly strives to check the sacrilegious conflagration.

"Frithiof, on high, like the rain-god drenched,

In the midst of the danger stands,

And stern in the face of the growing death,

He issues his calm commands."

But the morning wind blows strong from the north, and the destruction is complete.

"On, on through the grove the fire surge rolls,

No limits its waves can bound!

The sun is up! still the red abyss
Throws its awful glare around."

"Desolation reigns, and Frithiof turns
With horror and grief away."

In this revulsion of feeling, he gazes from his ship on the smoking ruins of the temple, and bitterly muses on his fate. What has he now to hope from gods or men? Desperate are his prospects, and desperate the course he embraces. He resolves to forswear the land, and henceforth live a life of violence upon the ocean; to become one of the vikings, seakings, or pirates, whose exploits in those times were thought deeds of glory, and especially smiled upon by the gods themselves!

Tegner adheres to historical probability, in thus sending forth his young hero to forget his blighted hopes in the excitements of a corsair-existence, amid scenes of blood and rapine. The younger sons of Scandinavian princes often had but a pitchblack ship and a fearless crew, instead of a portion of their patrimony; and were thought as well disposed of as the cadets of a noble English family at present, when placed in the army or navy. The causes of the sudden appearance of these pirates on the English and French coasts are inexplicable; and according to an able historian, only to be sought in the ancient traditions of Scandinavia. On the mountains of romantic Norway and wild Sweden grew those mighty trunks, which still supply the finest navies of the world with masts that scorn the tempest; and to the surrounding ocean all men, unblessed with wealth and impatient of labor on a hard soil, betook themselves. Under the influence of their bloody false gods, few were the