Every island, says Sir Edmund Head, and truly--for the name of almost
every island on the coast of England, Scotland, and Eastern Ireland, ends
in either _ey_ or _ay_ or _oe_, a Norse appellative, as is the word
island itself--is a mark of its having been, at some time or other,
visited by the Vikings of Scandinavia.
Norway, meanwhile, was convulsed by war; and what perhaps was of more
immediate consequence, Svend Fork-beard, whom we Englishmen call
Sweyn--the renegade from that Christian Faith which had been forced on
him by his German conqueror, the Emperor Otto II.--with his illustrious
son Cnut, whom we call Canute, were just calling together all the most
daring spirits of the Baltic coasts for the subjugation of England; and
when that great feat was performed, the Scandinavian emigration was
paralysed, probably, for a time by the fearful wars at home. While the
King of Sweden, and St. Olaf Tryggvason, king of Norway, were setting on
Denmark during Cnut's pilgrimage to Rome, and Cnut, sailing with a mighty
fleet to Norway, was driving St. Olaf into Russia, to return and fall in
the fratricidal battle of Stiklestead--during, strangely enough, a total
eclipse of the sun--Vinland was like enough to remain still uncolonised.
After Cnut's short-lived triumph--king as he was of Denmark, Norway,
England, and half Scotland, and what not of Wendish Folk inside the
Baltic--the force of the Norsemen seems to have been exhausted in their
native lands. Once more only, if I remember right, did 'Lochlin,' really
and hopefully send forth her 'mailed swarm' to conquer a foreign land;
and with a result unexpected alike by them and by their enemies. Had it
been otherwise, we might not have been here this day.
Let me sketch for you once more--though you have heard it, doubtless,
many a time--the tale of that tremendous fortnight which settled the fate
of Britain, and therefore of North America; which decided--just in those
great times when the decision was to be made--whether we should be on a
par with the other civilised nations of Europe, like them the 'heirs of
all the ages,' with our share not only of Roman Christianity and Roman
centralisation--a member of the great comity of European nations, held
together in one Christian bond by the Pope--but heirs also of Roman
civilisation, Roman literature, Roman law; and therefore, in due time, of
Greek philosophy and art. No less a question than this, it seems to me,
hung in the balance during that fortnight of autumn, 1066.
Poor old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and sad, lay in his new choir
of Westminster--where the wicked ceased from troubling, and the weary
were at rest. The crowned ascetic had left no heir behind. England
seemed as a corpse, to which all the eagles might gather together; and
the South-English, in their utter need, had chosen for their king the
ablest, and it may be the justest, man in Britain--Earl Harold
Godwinsson: himself, like half the upper classes of England then, of the
all-dominant Norse blood; for his mother was a Danish princess. Then out
of Norway, with a mighty host, came Harold Hardraade, taller than all
men, the ideal Viking of his time. Half-brother of the now dead St.
Olaf, severely wounded when he was but fifteen, at Stiklestead, when Olaf
fell, he had warred and plundered on many a coast. He had been away to
Russia to King Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor's Varanger guard at
Constantinople--and, it was whispered, had slain a lion there with his
bare hands; he had carved his name and his comrades' in Runic
characters--if you go to Venice you may see them at this day--on the
loins of the great marble lion, which stood in his time not in Venice but
in Athens. And now, king of Norway and conqueror, for the time, of
Denmark, why should he not take England, as Sweyn and Canute took it
sixty years before, when the flower of the English gentry perished at the
fatal battle of Assingdune? If he and his half-barbarous host had
conquered, the civilisation of Britain would have been thrown back,
perhaps, for centuries. But it was not to be.
England _was_ to be conquered by the Norman; but by the civilised, not
the barbaric; by the Norse who had settled, but four generations before,
in the North East of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the Ganger--so-called,
they say, because his legs were so long that, when on horseback, he
touched the ground and seemed to gang, or walk. He and his Norsemen had
taken their share of France, and called it Normandy to this day; and
meanwhile, with that docility and adaptability which marks so often truly
great spirits, they had changed their creed, their language, their
habits, and had become, from heathen and murderous Berserkers, the most
truly civilised people of Europe, and--as was most natural then--the most
faithful allies and servants of the Pope of Rome. So greatly had they
changed, and so fast, that William Duke of Normandy, the
great-great-grandson of Rolf the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest
gentleman, as well as the most cultivated sovereign, and the greatest
statesman and warrior, in all Europe.
So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings to Stamford Bridge by York;
and took, by coming, only that which Harold of England promised him,
namely, 'forasmuch as he was taller than any other man, seven feet of
English ground.'
The story of that great battle, told with a few inaccuracies, but told as
only great poets tell, you should read, if you have not read it already,
in the _Heimskringla_ of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of the North--
High feast that day held the birds of the air and the beasts of the
field,
White-tailed erne and sallow glede,
Dusky raven, with horny neb,
And the grey deer, the wolf of the wood.
The bones of the slain, men say, whitened the place for fifty years to
come.
And remember, that on the same day on which that fight befell--Sept. 27,
1066--William, Duke of Normandy, with all his French-speaking Norsemen,
was sailing across the British Channel, under the protection of a banner
consecrated by the Pope, to conquer that England which the Norse-speaking
Normans could not conquer.
And now King Harold showed himself a man. He turned at once from the
North of England to the South. He raised the folk of the Southern, as he
had raised those of the Central and Northern shires; and in sixteen
days--after a march which in those times was a prodigious feat--he was
entrenched upon the fatal down which men called Heathfield then, and
Senlac, but Battle to this day--with William and his French Normans
opposite him on Telham hill.
Then came the battle of Hastings. You all know what befell upon that
day; and how the old weapon was matched against the new--the English axe
against the Norman lance--and beaten only because the English broke their
ranks. If you wish to refresh your memories, read the tale once more in
Mr. Freeman's _History of England_, or Prof. Creasy's _Fifteen Decisive
Battles of the World_, or even, best of all, the late Lord Lytton's
splendid romance of _Harold_. And when you go to England, go, as some of
you may have gone already, to Battle; and there from off the Abbey
grounds, or from Mountjoy behind, look down off what was then 'The Heathy
Field,' over the long slopes of green pasture and the rich hop-gardens,
where were no hop-gardens then, and the flat tide-marshes winding between
the wooded heights, towards the southern sea; and imagine for yourselves
the feelings of an Englishman as he contemplates that broad green sloping
lawn, on which was decided the destiny of his native land. Here, right
beneath, rode Taillefer up the slope before them all, singing the song of
Roland, tossing his lance in air and catching it as it fell, with all the
Norse berserker spirit of his ancestors flashing out in him, at the
thought of one fair fight, and then purgatory, or Valhalla--Taillefer
perhaps preferred the latter. Yonder on the left, in that copse where
the red-ochre gully runs, is Sanguelac, the drain of blood, into which
(as the Bayeux tapestry, woven by Matilda's maids, still shows) the
Norman knights fell, horse and man, till the gully was bridged with
writhing bodies for those who rode after. Here, where you stand--the
crest of the hill marks where it must have been--was the stockade on
which depended the fate of England. Yonder, perhaps, stalked out one
English squire or house-carle after another: tall men with long-handled
battle-axes--one specially terrible, with a wooden helmet which no sword
could pierce--who hewed and hewed down knight on knight, till they
themselves were borne to earth at last. And here, among the trees and
ruins of the garden, kept trim by those who know the treasure which they
own, stood Harold's two standards of the fighting man and the dragon of
Wessex. And here, close by (for here, for many a century, stood the high
altar of Battle Abbey, where monks sang masses for Harold's soul), upon
this very spot the Swan-neck found her hero lover's corpse. 'Ah,' says
many an Englishman--and who will blame him for it--'how grand to have
died beneath that standard on that day!' Yes, and how right. And yet
how right, likewise, that the Norman's cry of Dexaie, 'God Help,' and not
the English hurrah, should have won that day, till William rode up
Mountjoye in the afternoon to see the English army, terrible even in
defeat, struggling through copse and marsh away toward Brede, and, like
retreating lions driven into their native woods, slaying more in the
pursuit than they slew even in the fight.
But so it was to be; for so it ought to have been. You, my American
friends, delight, as I have said already, in seeing the old places of the
old country. Go, I beg you, and look at that old place, and if you be
wise, you will carry back from it one lesson: that God's thoughts are not
as our thoughts; nor His ways as our ways.
It was a fearful time which followed. I cannot but believe that our
forefathers had been, in some way or other, great sinners, or two such
conquests as Canute's and William's would not have fallen on them within
the short space of sixty years. They did not want for courage, as
Stanford Brigg and Hastings showed full well. English swine, their
Norman conquerors called them often enough; but never English cowards.
Their ruinous vice, if we are to trust the records of the time, was what
the old monks called accidia--[Greek text]--and ranked it as one of the
seven deadly sins: a general careless, sleepy, comfortable habit of mind,
which lets all go its way for good or evil--a habit of mind too often
accompanied, as in the case of the Anglo-Danes, with self-indulgence,
often coarse enough. Huge eaters and huger drinkers, fuddled with ale,
were the men who went down at Hastings--though they went down like
heroes--before the staid and sober Norman out of France.
But those were fearful times. As long as William lived, ruthless as he
was to all rebels, he kept order and did justice with a strong and steady
hand; for he brought with him from Normandy the instincts of a truly
great statesman. And in his sons' time matters grew worse and worse.
After that, in the troubles of Stephen's reign, anarchy let loose tyranny
in its most fearful form, and things were done which recall the cruelties
of the old Spanish conquistadores in America. Scott's charming romance
of _Ivanhoe_ must be taken, I fear, as a too true picture of English
society in the time of Richard I.
And what came of it all? What was the result of all this misery and
wrong?
This, paradoxical as it may seem--that the Norman conquest was the making
of the English people; of the Free Commons of England.
Paradoxical, but true. First, you must dismiss from your minds the too
common notion that there is now, in England a governing Norman
aristocracy, or that there has been one, at least since the year 1215,
when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John by Normans and by English
alike. For the first victors at Hastings, like the first conquistadores
in America, perished, as the monk chronicles point out, rapidly by their
own crimes; and very few of our nobility can trace their names back to
the authentic Battle Abbey roll. The great majority of the peers have
sprung from, and all have intermarried with, the Commons; and the peerage
has been from the first, and has become more and more as centuries have
rolled on, the prize of success in life.
The cause is plain. The conquest of England by the Normans was not one
of those conquests of a savage by a civilised race, or of a cowardly race
by a brave race, which results in the slavery of the conquered, and
leaves the gulf of caste between two races, master and slave. That was
the case in France, and resulted, after centuries of oppression, in the
great and dreadful revolution of 1793, which convulsed not only France
but the whole civilised world. But caste, thank God, has never existed
in England, since at least the first generation after the Norman
conquest.
The vast majority, all but the whole population of England, have been
always free; and free, as they are not where caste exists, to change
their occupations. They could intermarry, if they were able men, into
the ranks above them; as they did sink, if they were unable men, into the
ranks below them. Any man acquainted with the origin of our English
surnames may verify this fact for himself, by looking at the names of a
single parish or a single street of shops. There, jumbled together, he
will find names marking the noblest Saxon or Angle blood--Kenward or
Kenric, Osgood or Osborne, side by side with Cordery or Banister--now
names of farmers in my own parish--or other Norman-French names which may
be, like those two last, in Battle Abbey roll--and side by side the
almost ubiquitous Brown, whose ancestor was probably some Danish or
Norwegian housecarle, proud of his name Biorn the bear, and the
ubiquitous Smith or Smythe, the smiter, whose forefather, whether he now
be peasant or peer, assuredly handled the tongs and hammer at his own
forge. This holds true equally in New England and in Old. When I search
through (as I delight to do) your New England surnames, I find the same
jumble of names--West Saxon, Angle, Danish, Norman, and French-Norman
likewise, many of primaeval and heathen antiquity, many of high nobility,
all worked together, as at home, to form the Free Commoners of England.
If any should wish to know more on this curious and important subject,
let me recommend them to study Ferguson's _Teutonic Name System_, a book
from which you will discover that some of our quaintest, and seemingly
most plebeian surnames--many surnames, too, which are extinct in England,
but remain in America--are really corruptions of good old Teutonic names,
which our ancestors may have carried in the German Forest, before an
Englishman set foot on British soil; from which he will rise with the
comfortable feeling that we English-speaking men, from the highest to the
lowest, are literally kinsmen. Nay, so utterly made up now is the old
blood-feud between Norseman and Englishman, between the descendants of
those who conquered and those who were conquered, that in the children of
our Prince of Wales, after 800 years, the blood of William of Normandy is
mingled with the blood of the very Harold who fell at Hastings. And so,
by the bitter woes which followed the Norman conquest was the whole
population, Dane, Angle, and Saxon, earl and churl, freeman and slave,
crushed and welded together into one homogeneous mass, made just and
merciful towards each other by the most wholesome of all teachings, a
community of suffering; and if they had been, as I fear they were, a lazy
and a sensual people, were taught
That life is not as idle ore,
But heated hot with burning fears,
And bathed in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the strokes of doom
To shape and use.
But how did these wild Vikings become Christian men? It is a long story.
So staunch a race was sure to be converted only very slowly. Noble
missionaries as Ansgar, Rembert, and Poppo, had worked for 150 years and
more among the heathens of Denmark. But the patriotism of the Norseman
always recoiled, even though in secret, from the fact that they were
German monks, backed by the authority of the German emperor; and many a
man, like Svend Fork-beard, father of the great Canute, though he had the
Kaiser himself for godfather, turned heathen once more, the moment he was
free, because his baptism was the badge of foreign conquest, and neither
pope nor Kaiser should lord it over him, body or soul. St. Olaf, indeed,
forced Christianity on the Norse at the sword's point, often by horrid
cruelties, and perished in the attempt. But who forced it on the
Norsemen of Scotland, England, Ireland, Neustria, Russia, and all the
Eastern Baltic? It was absorbed and in most cases, I believe, gradually
and willingly, as a gospel and good news to hearts worn out with the
storm of their own passions. And whence came their Christianity? Much
of it, as in the case of the Danes, and still more of the French Normans,
came direct from Rome, the city which, let them defy its influence as
they would, was still the fount of all theology, as well as of all
civilisation. But I must believe that much of it came from that
mysterious ancient Western Church, the Church of St. Patric, St. Bridget,
St. Columba, which had covered with rude cells and chapels the rocky
islets of the North Atlantic, even to Iceland itself. Even to Iceland;
for when that island was first discovered, about A.D. 840, the Norsemen
found in an isle, on the east and west and elsewhere, Irish books and
bells and wooden crosses, and named that island Papey, the isle of the
popes--some little colony of monks, who lived by fishing, and who are
said to have left the land when the Norsemen settled in it. Let us
believe, for it is consonant with reason and experience, that the sight
of those poor monks, plundered and massacred again and again by the
'mailed swarms of Lochlin,' yet never exterminated, but springing up
again in the same place, ready for fresh massacre, a sacred plant which
God had planted, and which no rage of man could trample out--let us
believe, I say, that that sight taught at last to the buccaneers of the
old world that there was a purer manliness, a loftier heroism, than the
ferocious self-assertion of the Berserker, even the heroism of humility,
gentleness, self-restraint, self-sacrifice. That there was a strength
which was made perfect in weakness; a glory, not of the sword but of the
cross. We will believe that that was the lesson which the Norsemen
learnt, after many a wild and bloodstained voyage, from the monks of Iona
or of Derry, which caused the building of such churches as that which
Sightrys, king of Dublin, raised about the year 1030, not in the Norse
but in the Irish quarter of Dublin: a sacred token of amity between the
new settlers and the natives on the ground of a common faith. Let us
believe, too, that the influence of woman was not wanting in the good
work--that the story of St. Margaret and Malcolm Canmore was repeated,
though inversely, in the case of many a heathen Scandinavian jarl, who,
marrying the princely daughter of some Scottish chieftain, found in her
creed at last something more precious than herself; while his brother or
his cousin became, at Dublin or Wexford or Waterford, the husband of some
saffron-robed Irish princess, 'fair as an elf,' as the old saying was;
'some maiden of the three transcendent hues,' of whom the old book of
Linane says--
Red as the blood which flowed from stricken deer,
White as the snow on which that blood ran down,
Black as the raven who drank up that blood.
--and possibly, as in the case of Brian Boru's mother, had given his
fair-haired sister in marriage to some Irish prince, and could not resist
the spell of their new creed, and the spell too, it may be, of some
sister of theirs who had long given up all thought of earthly marriage to
tend the undying fire of St. Bridget among the consecrated virgins of
Kildare.
I am not drawing from mere imagination. That such things must have
happened, and happened again and again, is certain to anyone who knows,
even superficially, the documents of that time. And I doubt not that, in
manners as well as in religion, the Norse were humanised and civilised by
their contact with the Celts, both in Scotland and in Ireland, Both
peoples had valour, intellect, imagination: but the Celt had that which
the burly angular Norse character, however deep and stately, and however
humorous, wanted; namely, music of nature, tenderness, grace, rapidity,
playfulness; just the qualities, combining with the Scandinavian (and in
Scotland with the Angle) elements of character which have produced, in
Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric poetry second to none in
the world.
And so they were converted to what was then a dark and awful creed; a
creed of ascetic self-torture and purgatorial fires for those who escaped
the still more dreadful, because endless, doom of the rest of the human
race. But, because it was a sad creed, it suited better men, who had,
when conscience reawakened in them, but too good reason to be sad; and
the minsters and cloisters which sprang up over the whole of Northern
Europe, and even beyond it, along the dreary western shores of Greenland
itself, are the symbols of a splendid repentance for their own sins and
for the sins of their forefathers.
Gudruna herself, of whom I spoke just now, one of those old Norse
heroines who helped to discover America, though a historic personage, is
a symbolic one likewise, and the pattern of a whole class. She, too,
after many journeys to Iceland, Greenland, and Winland, goes on a
pilgrimage to Rome, to get, I presume, absolution from the Pope himself
for all the sins of her strange, rich, stormy, wayward life.
Have you not read--many of you surely have--La Motte Fouque's _Romance of
Sintram_? It embodies all that I would say. It is the spiritual drama
of that early middle age; very sad, morbid if you will, but true to fact.
The Lady Verena ought not, perhaps, to desert her husband, and shut
herself up in a cloister. But so she would have done in those old days.
And who shall judge her harshly for so doing? When the brutality of the
man seems past all cure, who shall blame the woman if she glides away
into some atmosphere of peace and purity, to pray for him whom neither
warnings nor caresses will amend? It is a sad book, _Sintram_. And yet
not too sad. For they were a sad people, those old Norse forefathers of
ours. Their Christianity was sad; their minsters sad; there are few
sadder, though few grander, buildings than a Norman church.
And yet, perhaps, their Christianity did not make them sad. It was but
the other and the healthier side of that sadness which they had as
heathens. Read which you will of the old sagas--heathen or
half-Christian--the Eyrbiggia, Viga Glum, Burnt Niall, Grettir the
Strong, and, above all, Snorri Sturluson's _Heimskringla_ itself--and you
will see at once how sad they are. There is, in the old sagas, none of
that enjoyment of life which shines out everywhere in Greek poetry, even
through its deepest tragedies. Not in complacency with Nature's beauty,
but in the fierce struggle with her wrath, does the Norseman feel
pleasure. Nature to him was not, as in Mr. Longfellow's exquisite poem,
{91} the kind old nurse, to take him on her knee and whisper to him, ever
anew, the story without an end. She was a weird witch-wife, mother of
storm demons and frost giants, who must be fought with steadily, warily,
wearily, over dreary heaths and snow-capped fells, and rugged nesses and
tossing sounds, and away into the boundless sea--or who could live?--till
he got hardened in the fight into ruthlessness of need and greed. The
poor strip of flat strath, ploughed and re-ploughed again in the short
summer days, would yield no more; or wet harvests spoiled the crops, or
heavy snows starved the cattle. And so the Norseman launched his ships
when the lands were sown in spring, and went forth to pillage or to
trade, as luck would have, to summerted, as he himself called it; and
came back, if he ever came, in autumn to the women to help at
harvest-time, with blood upon his hand. But had he staid at home, blood
would have been there still. Three out of four of them had been mixed up
in some man-slaying, or had some blood-feud to avenge among their own
kin.
The whole of Scandinavia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Orkney, and the rest,
remind me ever of that terrible picture of the great Norse painter,
Tiddeman, in which two splendid youths, lashed together, in true Norse
duel fashion by the waist, are hewing each other to death with the short
axe, about some hot words over their ale. The loss of life, and that of
the most gallant of the young, in those days must have been enormous. If
the vitality of the race had not been even more enormous, they must have
destroyed each other, as the Red Indians have done, off the face of the
earth. They lived these Norsemen, not to live--they lived to die. For
what cared they? Death--what was death to them! what it was to the
Jomsburger Viking, who, when led out to execution, said to the headsman,
'Die! with all pleasure. We used to question in Jomsburg whether a man
felt when his head was off? Now I shall know; but if I do, take care,
for I shall smite thee with my knife. And meanwhile, spoil not this long
hair of mine; it is so beautiful.'
But, oh! what waste. What might not these men have done if they had
sought peace, not war; if they had learned a few centuries sooner to do
justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with their God?
And yet one loves them, blood-stained as they are. Your own poets, men
brought up under circumstances, under ideas the most opposite to theirs,
love them, and cannot help it. And why? It is not merely for their bold
daring, it is not merely for their stern endurance; nor again that they
had in them that shift and thrift, those steady and common-sense business
habits, which made their noblest men not ashamed to go on voyages of
merchandise. Nor is it, again, that grim humour--humour as of the modern
Scotch--which so often flashes out into an actual jest, but more usually
underlies unspoken all their deeds. Is it not rather that these men are
our forefathers? that their blood runs in the veins of perhaps three men
out of four in any general assembly, whether in America or in Britain?
Startling as the assertion may be, I believe it to be strictly true.
Be that as it may, I cannot read the stories of your western men, the
writings of Bret Harte, or Colonel John Hay, for instance, without
feeling at every turn that there are the old Norse alive again, beyond
the very ocean which they first crossed, 850 years ago.
Let me try to prove my point, and end with a story, as I began with one.
It is just 30 years before the Norman conquest of England, the evening of
the battle of Sticklestead. St. Olaf's corpse is still lying unburied on
the hillside. The reforming and Christian king has fallen in the attempt
to force Christianity and despotism on the Conservative and half-heathen
party--the free bonders or yeoman-farmers of Norway. Thormod, his
poet,--the man, as his name means, of thunder mood--who has been standing
in the ranks, at last has an arrow in his left side. He breaks off the
shaft, and thus sore wounded goes up, when all is lost, to a farm where
is a great barn full of wounded. One Kimbe comes, a man out of the
opposite or bonder part. 'There is great howling and screaming in
there,' he says. 'King Olaf's men fought bravely enough: but it is a
shame brisk young lads cannot bear their wounds. On what side wert thou
in the fight?' 'On the best side,' says the beaten Thormod. Kimbe sees
that Thormod has a gold bracelet on his arm. 'Thou art surely a king's
man. Give me thy gold ring and I will hide thee, ere the bonders kill
thee.'
Thormod said, 'Take it, if thou canst get it. I have lost that which is
worth more;' and he stretched out his left hand, and Kimbe tried to take
it. But Thormod, swinging his sword, cut off his hand; and it is said
Kimbe behaved no better over his wound than those he had been blaming.
Then Thormod went into the barn; and after he had sung his song there in
praise of his dead king, he went into an inner room, where was a fire,
and water warming, and a handsome girl binding up men's wounds. And he
sat down by the door; and one said to him 'Why art thou so dead pale?
Why dost thou not call for the leech?' Then sung Thormod--
I am not blooming; and the fair
And slender maiden loves to care
For blooming youths. Few care for me,
With Fenri's gold meal I can't fee;
and so forth, improvising after the old Norse fashion.
Then Thormod got up and went to the fire, and stood and warmed himself.
And the nurse-girl said to him, 'Go out man, and bring some of the
split-firewood which lies outside the door.' He went out and brought an
armful of wood and threw it down. Then the nurse-girl looked him in the
face and said, 'Dreadful pale is this man. Why art thou so?' Then sang
Thormod--
Thou wonderest, sweet bloom, at me,
A man so hideous to see.
The arrow-drift o'ertook me, girl,
A fine-ground arrow in the whirl
Went through me, and I feel the dart
Sits, lovely lass, too near my heart.
The girl said, 'Let me see thy wound.' Then Thormod sat down, and the
girl saw his wounds, and that which was in his side, and saw that there
was a piece of iron in it; but could not tell where it had gone. In a
stone pot she had leeks and other herbs, and boiled them, and gave the
wounded men of it to eat. But Thormod said, 'Take it away; I have no
appetite now for my broth.' Then she took a great pair of tongs and
tried to pull out the iron; but the wound was swelled, and there was too
little to lay hold of. Now said Thormod, 'Cut in so deep that thou canst
get at the iron, and give me the tongs.' She did as he said. Then took
Thormod the gold bracelet off his hand and gave it the nurse-girl, and
bade her do with it what she liked.
'It is a good man's gift,' said he. 'King Olaf gave me the ring this
morning.'
Then Thormod took the tongs and pulled the iron out. But on the iron was
a barb, on which hung flesh from the heart, some red, some white. When
he saw that, he said, 'The king has fed us well. I am fat, even to the
heart's roots.' And so leant back and was dead.
I shall not insult your intelligence by any comment or even epithet of my
own. I shall but ask you was not this man your kinsman? Does not the
story sound, allowing for all change of manners as well as of time and
place, like a scene out of your own Bret Harte or Colonel John Hay's
writings; a scene of the dry humour the rough heroism of your own far
West? Yes, as long as you have your _Jem Bludsos_ and _Tom Flynns of
Virginia City_, the old Norse blood is surely not extinct, the old Norse
spirit is not dead.
LECTURE IV.
THE SERVANT OF THE LORD.
I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old despotic empires
which were in every case the earliest known form of civilisation. Were I
minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some corrupt
and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its decay--as
did at last the Roman and then the Byzantine Empire--and, after raising a
laugh at the expense of the old system say, See what a superior people
you are now,--how impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is
anything so base and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before
the Revolution of 1793. Well that would be on the whole true, thank God;
but what need is there to say it?
Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own sins,
certain that we shall gain more instruction, though not more amusement,
by hunting out the good which is in anything than by hunting out its
evil. For me, true to that which I proposed in my last lecture, I have
chosen, not the worst, but the best despotism which I could find in
history, founded and ruled by a truly heroic personage, one whose name
has become a proverb and a legend, that so I might lift up your minds,
even by the contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to see that it, too,
could be a work and ordinance of God, and its hero the servant of the
Lord. For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the Persian
Empire, by this august title for two reasons--First, because the Hebrew
Scriptures call him so; and next, because he proved himself to be such by
his actions and their consequences--at least in the eyes of those who
believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-reaching Providence, by which
all human history is--
Bound by gold chains unto the throne of God.
His work was very different from any that need be done, or can be done,
in these our days. But while we thank God that such work is now as
unnecessary as impossible; we may thank God likewise that, when such work
was necessary and possible, a man was raised up to do it; and to do it,
as all accounts assert, better, perhaps, than it had ever been done
before or since.
True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation after nation, tribe after
tribe, and founded empires on their ruins, are now, I trust, about to be
replaced, throughout the world, as here and in Britain at home, by free
self-governed peoples--
The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
And that custom of conquest and empire and transplantation did more than
once corrupt the world. And yet in it, too, God may have more than once
fulfilled his own designs, as He did, if Scripture is to be believed, in
Cyrus, well surnamed the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire some
2,400 years ago. For these empires, it must be remembered, did at least
that which the Roman Empire did among a scattered number of savage
tribes, or separate little races, hating and murdering each other,
speaking different tongues, and worshipping different gods, and losing
utterly the sense of a common humanity, till they looked on the people
who dwelt in the next valley as fiends, to be sacrificed, if caught, to
their own fiends at home. Among such as these, empires did introduce
order, law, common speech, common interest, the notion of nationality and
humanity. They, as it were, hammered together the fragments of the human
race till they had moulded them into one. They did it cruelly, clumsily,
ill: but was there ever work done on earth, however noble, which was
not--alas, alas!--done somewhat ill?
Let me talk to you a little about the old hero. He and his hardy
Persians should be specially interesting to us. For in them first does
our race, the Aryan race, appear in authentic history. In them first did
our race give promise of being the conquering and civilising race of the
future world. And to the conquests of Cyrus--so strangely are all great
times and great movements of the human family linked to each other--to
his conquests, humanly speaking, is owing the fact that you are here, and
I am speaking to you at this moment.
It is an oft-told story: but so grand a one that I must sketch it for
you, however clumsily, once more.
In that mountain province called Farsistan, north-east of what we now
call Persia, the dwelling place of the Persians, there dwelt, in the
sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, a hardy tribe, of the purest
blood of Iran, a branch of the same race as the Celtic, Teutonic, Greek,
and Hindoo, and speaking a tongue akin to theirs. They had wandered
thither, said their legends, out of the far north-east, from off some
lofty plateau of Central Asia, driven out by the increasing cold, which
left them but two months of summer to ten of winter.
They despised at first--would that they had despised always!--the
luxurious life of the dwellers in the plains, and the effeminate customs
of the Medes--a branch of their own race who had conquered and
intermarried with the Turanian, or Finnish tribes; and adopted much of
their creed, as well as of their morals, throughout their vast but
short-lived Median Empire. 'Soft countries,' said Cyrus himself--so runs
the tale--'gave birth to small men. No region produced at once
delightful fruits and men of a warlike spirit.' Letters were to them,
probably then unknown. They borrowed them in after years, as they
borrowed their art, from Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Semitic
nations whom they conquered. From the age of five to that of twenty,
their lads were instructed but in two things--to speak the truth and to
shoot with the bow. To ride was the third necessary art, introduced,
according to Xenophon, after they had descended from their mountain
fastnesses to conquer the whole East.
Their creed was simple enough. Ahura Mazda--Ormuzd, as he has been
called since--was the one eternal Creator, the source of all light and
life and good. He spake his word, and it accomplished the creation of
heaven, before the water, before the earth, before the cow, before the
tree, before the fire, before man the truthful, before the Devas and
beasts of prey, before the whole existing universe; before every good
thing created by Ahura Mazda and springing from Truth.
He needed no sacrifices of blood. He was to be worshipped only with
prayers, with offerings of the inspiring juice of the now unknown herb
Homa, and by the preservation of the sacred fire, which, understand, was
not he, but the symbol--as was light and the sun--of the good spirit--of
Ahura Mazda. They had no images of the gods, these old Persians; no
temples, no altars, so says Herodotus, and considered the use of them a
sign of folly. They were, as has been well said of them, the Puritans of
the old world. When they descended from their mountain fastnesses, they
became the iconoclasts of the old world; and the later Isaiah, out of the
depths of national shame, captivity and exile, saw in them
brother-spirits, the chosen of the Lord, whose hero Cyrus, the Lord was
holding by his right hand, till all the foul superstitions and foul
effeminacies of the rotten Semitic peoples of the East, and even of Egypt
itself, should be crushed, though alas! only for a while, by men who felt
that they had a commission from the God of light and truth and purity, to
sweep out all that with the besom of destruction.
But that was a later inspiration. In earlier, and it may be happier,
times, the duty of the good man was to strive against all evil, disorder,
uselessness, incompetence in their more simple forms. 'He therefore is a
holy man,' says Ormuzd in the Zend-avesta, 'who has built a dwelling on
the earth, in which he maintains fire, cattle, his wife, his children,
and flocks and herds; he who makes the earth produce barley, he who
cultivates the fruits of the soil, cultivates purity; he advances the law
of Ahura Mazda as much as if he had offered a hundred sacrifices.'
To reclaim the waste, to till the land, to make a corner of the earth
better than they found it, was to these men to rescue a bit of Ormuzd's
world out of the usurped dominion of Ahriman; to rescue it from the
spirit of evil and disorder for its rightful owner, the Spirit of Order
and of Good.
For they believed in an evil spirit, these old Persians. Evil was not
for them a lower form of good. With their intense sense of the
difference between right and wrong it could be nothing less than hateful;
to be attacked, exterminated, as a personal enemy, till it became to them
at last impersonate and a person.
Zarathustra, the mystery of evil, weighed heavily on them and on their
great prophet, Zoroaster--splendour of gold, as I am told his name
signifies--who lived, no man knows clearly when or clearly where, but who
lived and lives for ever, for his works follow him. He, too, tried to
solve for his people the mystery of evil; and if he did not succeed, who
has succeeded yet? Warring against Ormuzd, Ahura Mazda, was Ahriman,
Angra Mainyus, literally the being of an evil mind, the ill-conditioned
being. He was labouring perpetually to spoil the good work of Ormuzd
alike in nature and in man. He was the cause of the fall of man, the
tempter, the author of misery and death; he was eternal and uncreate as
Ormuzd was. But that, perhaps, was a corruption of the purer and older
Zoroastrian creed. With it, if Ahriman were eternal in the past, he
would not be eternal in the future. Somehow, somewhen, somewhere, in the
day when three prophets--the increasing light, the increasing truth, and
the existing truth--should arise and give to mankind the last three books
of the Zend-avesta, and convert all mankind to the pure creed, then evil
should be conquered, the creation become pure again, and Ahriman vanish
for ever; and, meanwhile, every good man was to fight valiantly for
Ormuzd, his true lord, against Ahriman and all his works.
Men who held such a creed, and could speak truth and draw the bow, what
might they not do when the hour and the man arrived? They were not a
_big_ nation. No; but they were a great nation, even while they were
eating barley-bread and paying tribute to their conquerors the Medes, in
the sterile valleys of Farsistan.
And at last the hour and the man came. The story is half
legendary--differently told by different authors. Herodotus has one
tale, Xenophon another. The first, at least, had ample means of
information. Astyages is the old shah of the Median Empire, then at the
height of its seeming might and splendour and effeminacy. He has married
his daughter, the princess Mandane, to Cambyses, seemingly a vassal-king
or prince of the pure Persian blood. One night the old man is troubled
with a dream. He sees a vine spring from his daughter, which overshadows
all Asia. He sends for the Magi to interpret; and they tell him that
Mandane will have a son who will reign in his stead. Having sons of his
own, and fearing for the succession, he sends for Mandane, and, when her
child is born, gives it to Harpagus, one of his courtiers, to be slain.
The courtier relents, and hands it over to a herdsman, to be exposed on
the mountains. The herdsman relents in turn, and brings the babe up as
his own child.
When the boy, who goes by the name of Agradates, is grown, he is at play
with the other herd-boys, and they choose him for a mimic king. Some he
makes his guards, some he bids build houses, some carry his messages.
The son of a Mede of rank refuses, and Agradates has him seized by his
guards and chastised with the whip. The ancestral instincts of command
and discipline are showing early in the lad.
The young gentleman complains to his father, the father to the old king,
who of course sends for the herdsman and his boy. The boy answers in a
tone so exactly like that in which Xenophon's Cyrus would have answered,
that I must believe that both Xenophon's Cyrus and Herodotus' Cyrus (like
Xenophon's Socrates and Plato's Socrates) are real pictures of a real
character; and that Herodotus' story, though Xenophon says nothing of it,
is true.
He has done nothing, the noble boy says, but what was just. He had been
chosen king in play, because the boys thought him most fit. The boy whom
he had chastised was one of those who chose him. All the rest obeyed:
but he would not, till at last he got his due reward. 'If I deserve
punishment for that,' says the boy, 'I am ready to submit.'
The old king looks keenly and wonderingly at the young king, whose
features seem somewhat like his own. Likely enough in those days, when
an Iranian noble or prince would have a quite different cast of
complexion and of face from a Turanian herdsman. A suspicion crosses
him; and by threats of torture he gets the truth from the trembling
herdsman.
To the poor wretch's rapture the old king lets him go unharmed. He has a
more exquisite revenge to take, and sends for Harpagus, who likewise
confesses the truth. The wily old tyrant has naught but gentle words.
It is best as it is. He has been very sorry himself for the child, and
Mandane's reproaches had gone to his heart. 'Let Harpagus go home and
send his son to be a companion to the new-found prince. To-night there
will be great sacrifices in honour of the child's safety, and Harpagus is
to be a guest at the banquet.'
Harpagus comes; and after eating his fill, is asked how he likes the
king's meat? He gives the usual answer; and a covered basket is put
before him, out of which he is to take--in Median fashion--what he likes.
He finds in it the head and hands and feet of his own son. Like a true
Eastern he shows no signs of horror. The king asks him if he knew what
flesh he had been eating. He answers that he knew perfectly. That
whatever the king did pleased him.
Like an Eastern courtier, he knew how to dissemble, but not to forgive,
and bided his time. The Magi, to their credit, told Astyages that his
dream had been fulfilled, that Cyrus--as we must now call the foundling
prince--had fulfilled it by becoming a king in play, and the boy is let
to go back to his father and his hardy Persian life. But Harpagus does
not leave him alone, nor perhaps, do his own thoughts. He has wrongs to
avenge on his grandfather. And it seems not altogether impossible to the
young mountaineer.
He has seen enough of Median luxury to despise it and those who indulge
in it. He has seen his own grandfather with his cheeks rouged, his
eyelids stained with antimony, living a womanlike life, shut up from all
his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio.
He calls together the mountain rulers; makes friends with Tigranes, an
Armenian prince, a vassal of the Mede, who has his wrongs likewise to
avenge. And the two little armies of foot-soldiers--the Persians had no
cavalry--defeat the innumerable horsemen of the Mede, take the old king,
keep him in honourable captivity, and so change, one legend says, in a
single battle, the fortunes of the whole East.
And then begins that series of conquests of which we know hardly
anything, save the fact that they were made. The young mountaineer and
his playmates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, sweep onward
towards the West, teaching their men the art of riding, till the Persian
cavalry becomes more famous than the Median had been. They gather to
them, as a snow-ball gathers in rolling, the picked youth of every tribe
whom they overcome. They knit these tribes to them in loyalty and
affection by that righteousness--that truthfulness and justice--for which
Isaiah in his grandest lyric strains has made them illustrious to all
time; which Xenophon has celebrated in like manner in that exquisite book
of his--the _Cyropaedia_. The great Lydian kingdom of Croesus--Asia
Minor as we call it now--goes down before them. Babylon itself goes
down, after that world-famed siege which ended in Belshazzar's feast; and
when Cyrus died--still in the prime of life, the legends seem to say--he
left a coherent and well-organised empire, which stretched from the
Mediterranean to Hindostan.
So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds probable and rational
enough. It may not do so to you; for it has not to many learned men.
They are inclined to 'relegate it into the region of myth;' in plain
English, to call old Herodotus a liar, or at least a dupe. What means
those wise men can have at this distance of more than 2000 years, of
knowing more about the matter than Herodotus, who lived within 100 years
of Cyrus, I for myself, cannot discover. And I say this without the
least wish to disparage these hypercritical persons. For there are--and
more there ought to be, as long as lies and superstitions remain on this
earth--a class of thinkers who hold in just suspicion all stories which
savour of the sensational, the romantic, even the dramatic. They know
the terrible uses to which appeals to the fancy and the emotions have
been applied, and are still applied to enslave the intellects, the
consciences, the very bodies of men and women. They dread so much from
experience the abuse of that formula, that a thing is so beautiful it
must be true, that they are inclined to reply, 'Rather let us say boldly,
it is so beautiful that it cannot be true. Let us mistrust, or even
refuse to believe _a priori_, and at first sight, all startling,
sensational, even poetic tales, and accept nothing as history, which is
not as dull as the ledger of a dry goods' store.' But I think that
experience, both in nature and in society, are against that ditch-water
philosophy. The weather, being governed by laws, ought always to be
equable and normal, and yet you have whirlwinds, droughts, thunderstorms.
The share-market, being governed by laws, ought to be always equable and
normal, and yet you have startling transactions, startling panics,
startling disclosures, and a whole sensational romance of commercial
crime and folly. Which of us has lived to be fifty years old, without
having witnessed in private life sensation tragedies, alas! sometimes too
fearful to be told, or at least sensational romances, which we shall take
care not to tell, because we shall not be believed? Let the ditch-water
philosophy say what it will, human life is not a ditch, but a wild and
roaring river, flooding its banks, and eating out new channels with many
a landslip. It is a strange world, and man, a strange animal, guided, it
is true, usually by most commonplace motives; but, for that reason, ready
and glad at times to escape from them and their dulness and baseness; to
give vent, if but for a moment, in wild freedom, to that demoniac
element, which, as Goethe says, underlies his nature and all nature; and
to prefer for an hour, to the normal and respectable ditch-water, a
bottle of champagne or even a carouse on fire-water, let the consequences
be what they may.
How else shall we explain such a phenomenon as those old crusades? Were
they undertaken for any purpose, commercial or other? Certainly not for
lightening an overburdened population. Nay, is not the history of your
own Mormons, and their exodus into the far West, one of the most
startling instances which the world has seen for several centuries, of
the unexpected and incalculable forces which lie hid in man? Believe me,
man's passions, heated to igniting point, rather than his prudence cooled
down to freezing point, are the normal causes of all great human
movement. And a truer law of social science than any that political
economists are wont to lay down, is that old 'Dov' e la Donna' of the
Italian judge, who used to ask, as a preliminary to every case, civil or
criminal, which was brought before him, 'Dov' e la Donna?' 'Where is the
lady?' certain, like a wise old gentleman, that a woman was most probably
at the bottom of the matter.
Strangeness? Romance? Did any of you ever read--if you have not you
should read--Archbishop Whately's _Historic Doubts about the Emperor
Napoleon the First_? Therein the learned and witty Archbishop proved, as
early as 1819, by fair use of the criticism of Mr. Hume and the Sceptic
School, that the whole history of the great Napoleon ought to be treated
by wise men as a myth and a romance, that there is little or no evidence
of his having existed at all; and that the story of his strange successes
and strange defeats was probably invented by our Government in order to
pander to the vanity of the English nation.
I will say this, which Archbishop Whately, in a late edition,
foreshadows, wittily enough--that if one or two thousand years hence,
when the history of the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his rise and
fall, shall come to be subjected to critical analysis by future
Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, it will be proved by
them to be utterly mythical, incredible, monstrous--and that all the
more, the more the actual facts remain to puzzle their unimaginative
brains. What will they make, two thousand years hence, of the landing at
Boulogne with the tame eagle? Will not that, and stranger facts still,
but just as true, be relegated to the region of myth, with the dream of
Astyages, and the young and princely herdsman playing at king over his
fellow-slaves?
But enough of this. To me, these bits of romance often seem the truest,
as well as the most important, portions of history.
When old Herodotus tells me how, King Astyages having guarded the
frontier, Harpagus sent a hunter to young Cyrus with a fresh-killed hare,
telling him to open it in private; and how, sewn up in it was the letter,
telling him that the time to rebel was come, I am inclined to say, That
must be true. So beneath the dignity of history, so quaint and
unexpected, it is all the more likely _not_ to have been invented.
So with that other story--How young Cyrus giving out that his grandfather
had made him general of the Persians, summoned them all, each man with a
sickle in his hand, into a prairie full of thorns, and bade them clear it
in one day; and how when they, like loyal men, had finished, he bade them
bathe, and next day he took them into a great meadow and feasted them
with corn and wine, and all that his father's farm would yield, and asked
them which day they liked best; and, when they answered as was to be
expected, how he opened his parable and told them, 'Choose, then, to work
for the Persians like slaves, or to be free with me.'
Such a tale sounds to me true. It has the very savour of the parables of
the Old Testament; as have, surely, the dreams of the old Sultan, with
which the tale begins. Do they not put us in mind of the dreams of
Nebuchadnezzar, in the Book of Daniel?
Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are very likely to be
true. Understand me, I only say likely; the ditch-water view of history
is not all wrong. Its advocates are right in saying great historic
changes are not produced simply by one great person, by one remarkable
event. They have been preparing, perhaps, for centuries. They are the
result of numberless forces, acting according to laws, which might have
been foreseen, and will be foreseen, when the science of History is more
perfectly understood.
For instance, Cyrus could not have conquered the Median Empire at a
single blow, if first that empire had not been utterly rotten; and next,
if he and his handful of Persians had not been tempered and sharpened, by
long hardihood, to the finest cutting edge.
Yes, there were all the materials for the catastrophe--the cannon, the
powder, the shot. But to say that the Persians must have conquered the
Medes, even if Cyrus had never lived, is to say, as too many philosophers
seem to me to say, that, given cannon, powder, and shot, it will fire
itself off some day if we only leave it alone long enough.
It may be so. But our usual experience of Nature and Fact is, that
spontaneous combustion is a rare and exceptional phenomenon; that if a
cannon is to be fired, someone must arise and pull the trigger. And I
believe that in Society and Politics, when a great event is ready to be
done, someone must come and do it--do it, perhaps, half unwittingly, by
some single rash act--like that first fatal shot fired at Fort
Sumter--which makes, as by an electric spark, a whole nation flash into
enduring flame.
But to return to Cyrus and his Persians.
I know not whether the _Cyropaedia_ is much read in your schools and
universities. But it is one of the books which I should like to see,
either in a translation or its own exquisite Greek, in the hands of every
young man. It is not all fact. It is but a historic romance. But it is
better than history. It is an ideal book, like Sidney's _Arcadia_ or
Spenser's _Fairy Queen_--the ideal self-education of an ideal hero. And
the moral of the book--ponder it well, all young men who have the chance
or the hope of exercising authority among your fellow-men, the noble and
most Christian moral of that heathen book is this: that the path to solid
and beneficent influence over our fellow-men lies, not through brute
force, not through cupidity, but through the highest morality; through
justice, truthfulness, humanity, self-denial, modesty, courtesy, and all
which makes man or woman lovely in the eyes of mortals or of God.
Yes, the _Cyropaedia_ is a noble book, about a noble personage. But I
cannot forget that there are nobler words by far concerning that same
noble personage, in the magnificent series of Hebrew Lyrics, which
begins, 'Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith the Lord'--in which the
inspired poet, watching the rise of Cyrus and his Puritans, and the fall
of Babylon, and the idolatries of the East, and the coming deliverance of
his own countrymen, speaks of the Persian hero in words so grand that
they have been often enough applied, and with all fitness, to one greater
than Cyrus, and than all men:--
Who raised up the righteous man from the East,
And called him to attend his steps?
Who subdued nations at his presence,
And gave him dominion over kings?
And made them like the dust before his sword,
And the driven stubble before his bow?
He pursueth them, he passeth in safety,
By a way never trodden before by his feet.
Who hath performed and made these things,
Calling the generations from the beginning?
I, Jehovah, the first and the last, I am the same.
Behold my servant, whom I will uphold;
My chosen, in whom my soul delighteth;
I will make my spirit rest upon him,
And he shall publish judgment to the nations.
He shall not cry aloud, nor clamour,
Nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets.
The bruised reed he shall not break,
And the smoking flax he shall not quench.
He shall publish justice, and establish it.
His force shall not be abated, nor broken,
Until he has firmly seated justice in the earth,
And the distant nations shall wait for his Law.
Thus saith the God, even Jehovah,
Who created the heavens, and stretched them out;
Who spread abroad the earth, and its produce,
I, Jehovah, have called thee for a righteous end,
And I will take hold of thy hand, and preserve thee,
And I will give thee for a covenant to the people,
And for a light to the nations;
To open the eyes of the blind,
To bring the captives out of prison,
And from the dungeon those who dwell in darkness.
I am Jehovah--that is my name;
And my glory will I not give to another,
Nor my praise to the graven idols.
Who saith to Cyrus--Thou art my shepherd,
And he shall fulfil all my pleasure:
Who saith to Jerusalem--Thou shalt be built;
And to the Temple--Thou shalt be founded.
Thus saith Jehovah to his anointed,
To Cyrus whom I hold fast by his right hand,
That I may subdue nations under him,
And loose the loins of kings;
That I may open before him the two-leaved doors,
And the gates shall not be shut;
I will go before thee
And bring the mountains low.
The gates of brass will I break in sunder,
And the bars of iron hew down.
And I will give thee the treasures of darkness,
And the hoards hid deep in secret places,
That thou mayest know that I am Jehovah.
I have surnamed thee, though thou knowest not me.
I am Jehovah and none else:
Beside me there is no God.
I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me,
That they may know from the rising of the sun,
And from the west, that there is none beside me;
I am Jehovah, and none else;
Forming light, and creating darkness;
Forming peace, and creating evil.
I, Jehovah, make all these.
This is the Hebrew prophet's conception of the great Puritan of the Old
World who went forth with such a commission as this, to destroy the idols
of the East, while
The isles saw that, and feared,
And the ends of the earth were afraid;
They drew near, they came together;
Everyone helped his neighbour,
And said to his brother, Be of good courage.
The carver encouraged the smith,
He that smoothed with the hammer
Him that smote on the anvil;
Saying of the solder, It is good;
And fixing the idol with nails, lest it be moved;