And Gudrun takes heart. When Thurid tells her brother Kiartan that Gudrun has married another, his joy is shivered into atoms before him. But he can say, even then:

Now is this world clean changed for me
In this last minute, yet indeed I see
That still it will go on for all my pain;
Come then, my sister, let us back again;
I must meet folk, and face the life beyond,
And, as I may, walk 'neath the dreadful bond
Of ugly pain—such men our fathers were,
Not lightly bowed by any weight of care.

(P. 311.)

And Kiartan does his work in the world. Poor Refna, when she has married Kiartan hears women talking of the love that still is between Gudrun and Kiartan. She goes to Kiartan with the story, beginning with words whose pathos must conquer the most stoical of readers:

Indeed of all thy grief I knew,
But deemed if still thou saw'st me kind and true,
Not asking too much, yet not failing aught
To show that not far off need love be sought,
If thou shouldst need love—if thou sawest all this,
Thou wouldst not grudge to show me what a bliss
Thy whole love was, by giving unto me
As unto one who loved thee silently,
Now and again the broken crumbs thereof:
Alas! I, having then no part in love,
Knew not how naught, naught can allay the soul
Of that sad thirst, but love untouched and whole!
Kinder than e'er I durst have hoped thou art,
Forgive me then, that yet my craving heart
Is so unsatisfied; I know that thou
Art fain to dream that I am happy now,
And for that seeming ever do I strive;
Thy half-love, dearest, keeps me still alive
To love thee; and I bless it—but at whiles,—

(P. 343)

And thus she gains strength to live her life.

Here, then, in Bodli, is another of the great tragic figures in literature—a sick man. There are many of them, even in the highest rank of literary creations, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth! Wrong-headed, defective as they are, we would not have them otherwise. The pearl of greatest price is the result of an abnormal or morbid process.

Bodli comes to us from Icelandic literature, and in that fact we note the solidarity of poetic geniuses. Not only is the great figure of Bodli proof of this solidarity, but many other features of this poem prove it. "Lively feeling for a situation and power to express it constitute the poet," said Goethe. There are dramatic situations in "The Lovers of Gudrun" which hold the reader in a breathless state till the last word is said, and then leave him marveling at the imagination that could conceive the scene, and the power that could express it. There are gentler scenes, too, in the poem, where beauty and grace are conceived as fair as ever poet dreamed, and the workmanship is thoroughly adequate. As an example of the first, take the scene of Bodli's mourning over Kiartan's dead body. It is here that we get that knowledge of Bodli's woe that robs us of a cause against him. What agony is that which can speak thus over the body of the dead rival!

. . . Didst thou quite
Know all the value of that dear delight
As I did? Kiartan, she is changed to thee;
Yea, and since hope is dead changed too to me,
What shall we do, if, each of each forgiven,
We three shall meet at last in that fair heaven
The new faith tells of? Thee and God I pray
Impute it not for sin to me to-day,
If no thought I can shape thereof but this:
O friend, O friend, when thee I meet in bliss,
Wilt thou not give my love Gudrun to me,
Since now indeed thine eyes made clear can see
That I of all the world must love her most?