“Pleasant ’tis in boat on water,
Swaying as the boat glides onward,
Gliding o’er the sparkling water,
Driving o’er its shiny surface,
While the wind the boat is rocking,
And the waves drive on the vessel,
While the west-wind rocks it gently,
And the south-wind drives it onward.”
What poem do these lines remind you of, Judicia? I know that you will promptly respond Hiawatha. But the Finns would put it the other way about, and tell us that Hiawatha reminded them of the Kalevala, and they would be right, for Longfellow learned this meter from a German translation of Kalevala, a meter in which all varieties of Finnish verse are written. Kalevala means the “Land of Heroes,” and is a long poem describing every phase of Finnish life, animate and inanimate. It is a collection of the folk lore and ancient runes of the people, gathered together with infinite pains and put into modern rhyme and meter by Elias Lönnrot, a poor country doctor, who spent all his life in an inland village but yet made the greatest of all contributions to Finnish literature. We must take the Kalevala along with us as we travel through Finnish lakeland.
This unknown old poet of the folk songs, who wrote before the recorded history of Finland began, serves as a pretty good botanical guide to the trees and shrubs along the banks of this great waterway when he tells us that Sampsa, the good and all-powerful genius of the older time, planted the trees which delight us in these later days.