"There is told a wonderful tale,
How the King stripped off his mail,
Like leaves of the brown sea-kale,
As he swam beneath the main;
"But the young grew old and gray,
And never by night or day
In his kingdom of Norroway
Was King Olaf seen again."
The victory must be won by other weapons. In the convent of Drontheim, Astrid, the abbess, hears a voice in the darkness:—
"Cross against corslet,
Love against hatred.
Peace-cry for war-cry!"
The voice continues in peaceful music, forecasting heavenly rest:—
"As torrents in summer,
Half dried in their channels,
Suddenly rise, though the
Sky is still cloudless,
For rain has been falling
Far off at their fountains;
"So hearts that are fainting
Grow full to o'erflowing,
And they that behold it
Marvel, and know not
That God at their fountains
Far off has been raining."
With this exquisitely beautiful strain of the abbess the Saga ends.
The theologian muses aloud upon creeds and churches, then tells a fearful tragedy of Spain,—the story of a father who betrays his daughter to the fires of Torquemada. It chills the heart to think that such unspeakable ruin of a human soul was ever wrought by any system that even professed to be Christian. Moloch was truly divine, compared with the God of the Spanish Inquisition. But the gloom of the tragedy is not allowed to linger. The poet scatters it by the story of the merry "Birds of Killingworth," which appears elsewhere in the pages of this number of the "Atlantic." The blithe beauty of the verses is captivating, and the argument of the shy preceptor is the most poetic plea that ever wooed a world to justice. What an airy felicity in the lines,—
"'Tis always morning somewhere, and above
The awakening continents from shore to shore
Somewhere the birds are singing evermore."