in five days the sun will shine upon them. And the latter assemble and celebrate, in the dark, it is true, the feast of the glad tidings. Among the people of Thule this is the greatest of their festivals. I believe that these islanders, although the same thing happens every year with them, nevertheless are in a state of fear, lest sometime the sun should be wholly lost to them." Not only this island of the sea, but tracts of mainland, were reported to be subject to night and cold. Pliny injects into his sober book on natural history the Roman terror of the North. Along the northern boundary of Scythiaour southern Russia-was supposed to lie a range of mountains, and their bleak uplands he describes as a district of ever-falling snow, a part of the world accursed by nature and shrouded in thick darkness. "It produces nothing," he adds, "but frost, and is the chilly hiding-place of the north wind." The North Wind-Boreas-how savagely he blazes his wild way down through the classical centuries! Out of the north wind grief came forth, As sire of the white fillies of the Egean which rear and dash against the shore, he first appears in Greek mythology. A "whirlwind-footed bridegroom," he ravished the tender princess of primeval Athens, and marred her city's charm with the cruel ways of Thrace. Lending his brutal might, for once, to the cause of right, when Hellas was at bay, he drove the Persian ships to disaster, and earned a tempered gratitude and reluctant shrine from the humane Athenians. In plainer descriptions of the weather the north wind brought cold and misery wherever it blew. A Boeotian farmer, in a northern storm, could hear the very earth howl, and the woods, up on the slopes of Helicon, roar loud and long. The wild animals crept low to escape the drifting snow, and the oxen cowered in their stalls. The farmer shivered even in his thick underclothes and woollen coat, heavy socks and oxhide shoes. Pulling his cap down over his ears, he stamped his way from barn to kitchen. The Sicilian shepherd groaned, when Boreas chilled his flowers and killed his birds. The ten thousand Greeks in a foreign land, marching back from a futile expedition through Asia Minor to the releasing sea, met the North Wind face to face in the snowy mountains near the upper waters of the Euphrates. It" scorched and froze them through," Xenophon reported, with sad details of suffering and death among men and beasts. His exact words-whether by memory or by chance-lately echoed from another brave journey, in a still deadlier quarter of the globe. Dr. Wilson, before starting out to die with Captain Scott, described in foreboding verse the rigors of the Antarctic, As it scorched and froze us through and through With the bite of the drifting snow. The terror of the South Pole had not laid its grasp upon the imagination of the Mediterranean peoples, who, in the regions below their own sane and temperate clime, guessed only at the mysterious tropics. But the Arctic Circle above haunted them. From it a pall of darkness spread to civilization, a cruel wind blew upon man's spirit, frost and snow chilled the palpitating loveliness of life. The ancient terror of the North can be detected, not only in troubled echoes of Viking stories, and direct descriptions of the hateful winter of personal experience, but in Greek and Roman dreams of happy regions, fit for gods to dwell in, or for the blessed dead, or for sated and weary toilers who had earned the right to rest. In these lovely places the north wind never burns and freezes, the snow never drifts, the light never fails. As soon as the Greek imagination lifts itself over the edge of history, we find the gods dwelling in a home that always is secure-" neither by winds is it shaken, or ever is it drenched by the showers, nor ever comes near it the snowstorm. But the aether, cloudless, is outspread above it, and bright is the gleam that runs o'er it." Near such an Olympus lay the Elysian fields, even as the traveller today, in approaching the actual mountain, finds meadows of asphodel lying, luminous, under the twilight sky. The matured Greek genius allowed to Pindar a vision of the abode of the righteous dead, from which is excluded any suggestion of darkness and of storm-winds: For them the night all through In that broad realm below, The splendor of the sun spreads endless light; Their city of the tombs with incense trees, And golden chalices But men, worn with battling the elements, forcing food out of the earth, defeating their enemies, fighting against heavy odds for each and every gain, have never been willing to believe that only by divinity or by death could ease and rest be won. So upon the map of this world have been laid the Happy Isles, Cradled and hung in clear tranquility. The desire for them has been well-nigh universal. Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Irishmen and Welshmen, Icelanders, all have believed that somewhere in the sea might be found these islands, touched only by the warmer winds, given over to an eternal spring, unmarred by blight or chill, by sickness or old age, by sorrow or sin. Nor has English poetry allowed science wholly to wrest from our sobered minds a beautiful dream of Lands indiscoverable in the unheard of west, Round which the strong stream of a sacred sea There shows not her white wings and windy feet. To the Greeks and Romans, who knew so little of the west, it seemed probable that happy isles might lie in that actual geographical direction. It was in western seas that Odysseus was forever meeting with those enchantments of nature and of woman which made him forget his gaunt and rock-ribbed Ithaca and the rigors of domestic fidelity. Then, as navigation enlarged its bounds, and travellers' tales increased, legendary islands of the old sagas seemed really to be described in the west beyond the daily thoroughfares. At last, in the year preceding Julius Cæsar, they emerge, with clear outlines, in a story of the Roman general Sertorius-a story which is typical of ageless human desire. Sertorius had served his country well against external foes, only to be hounded out of Rome by political enemies. Driven again from his Spanish refuge, in danger of his life, he was told by sailors of some islands called the Islands of the Blest: "Rains fall there seldom and in moderate showers, but for the most part they have gentle breezes, bringing along with them soft dews, which render the soil not only rich for ploughing and planting, but so abundantly fruitful that it produces spon taneously an abundance of delicate fruits, sufficient to feed the inhabitants, who may here enjoy all things without trouble or labor. The seasons of the year are temperate and the transitions from one to another so moderate that the air is always serene and pleasant. The rough northerly and southerly winds which blow from the coasts of Europe and Africa, dissipated in the vast open space, utterly lose their force before they reach the islands. The soft western and southerly winds which breathe upon them sometimes produce gentle sprinkling showers, which they carry along with them from the sea, but more usually bring days of moist bright weather, cooling and gently fertilizing the soil. When Sertorius heard this account, he was seized with a wonderful passion for these islands, and had an extreme desire to go and live there in peace and quietness and safe from oppression and unending wars." The Happy Isles, described by sailors to this unhappy general, are interpreted by historians to be the Canaries on the coast of Africa. But dreams move on swift wings and the imagination has ever carried the home of happiness further and further on. Horace, in the days of his youthful revolt, threw it far beyond Rome and the Etruscan sea. Centuries later Bishop Berkeley applied the famous Horatian description of peace and virtue to the Bermudas, where he hoped to find, for letters and art, a blessed asylum from the decadence of Europe. Westward the course of empire takes its way, exclaimed this dreamer. And any inhabitant of southern California will tell you-and persuade most of you that the Happy Isles, god-driven over the face of the waters, have at last come to anchorage in the Pacific, and found their true incarnation in our Land of the Golden West. Thus, in flight from Boreas, we have sailed, even as Odysseus sailed, from sea to western sea, following the chart handed to us by the first Greek bard. But in mad denial-welling up from unplumbed depths of being-my own vessel refuses to make port. Another course to freedom impels my sails. It is a course charted by the same Hellenes who sent me westward. It is a harsh, forbidding route, straight northward into the dread lair of the North Wind. But the quest will lead out beyond storms into peace, beyond terrors into happiness, beyond darkness into day. The Greeks started the story of a blessed and contented race which dwelt beyond Boreas. It is described in a matterof-fact way by Pliny, in connection with his wild Rhipsan mountains: "By these mountains and beyond the North Wind dwells, if we are willing to believe it, a happy people, the Hyperboreans, who have long life and are famous for many marvels which border on the fabulous." Modern philologists would have us believe that a mere false derivation brought these people into being. But nursed by the mythmakers and poets, their life has persisted. The Hyperboreans have been even more real than the Hesperides. The vigor of a belief in their existence is proved by the fact that on the geographical maps of the twelfth century of our era they occupy, with sturdy realism, the most northern regions of the earth. By an amazing paradox, the early stories of these northerners make them ministers, in a special sense, of the God of Light. Apollo pierced the world's darkness in the Greek sky, in the Greek intellect, in the Greek charm. And yet this personified Radiance loved the Hyperboreans. He who never set foot on Charon's boat often crossed the ferry of the North. Happy in his favor, this hyperboreal people bound" golden bay leaves in their hair, and made them merry cheer." Is it not possible that, today, the descendants of these bay-crowned victors are to be found among those who make themselves at home in harsh and stormy dwelling-places? At least in one quality these people resemble the Hyperboreans of old. For the North they cherish a passion which places them beyond the North Wind, in a contentment as sweet, a happiness as beautiful as ever existed in the Happy Isles. The poetry of our own northern tongue reflects this passion again and again. One English poet even puts it into the mouth of Odysseus, as he spurns a western island of pleasaunce: This odorous, amorous isle of violets, That leans all leaves into the glassy deep, Then stars like opening eyes on closing flowers- Yon lashed and streaming rock and sobbing crag, |