were always signally repulsed. At length they hit upon an expedient

which enabled them to advance undetected, at midnight, to the very dwellings of the Northmen, and where, at the time, they slept. They then set fire to the dwellings, and the inmates, as they rushed forth, were instantly killed by their Eskimo foes. All thus fell except Igaliko himself and his youngest son, whom the old man caught up in his arms, whilst he made his escape to the mountains. They pursued him, but in vain. He was never seen afterwards.

Thus ends the story of the Northmen in America.

But the result of these discoveries by the Northmen has not been told. Nothing is ever utterly lost, in the Universe. When the last settlement -the last appearances even of a settlement of the Northmen had disappeared from Vinland, Markland, Helluland, and Greenland; when the last face of anyone belonging to what we call the Caucasian race had vanished from the Western Hemisphere; that is to say, in the year 1477, and in the month of February, there landed at Hvalfjord, on the southern coast of Iceland, a strange man, named Christopher Colon-but whose surname has been latinized and popularized into Columbus. This curious man had, for years past, been haunted and goaded by a certain idea of the globular formation of the earth, and by a restless curiosity to know what corollaries might follow the proof of that fact. So he had come up to see these Icelanders-once, if not now, the boldest, best, and most experienced, and most enterprising seamen in the worldand to hear if they could give him any information in the matter. In a few weeks after his arrival at Hvalfjord, the Bishop of Skalholt would also be there, in the course of his annual visitation to that portion of the diocese. This particular year his visitation would probably be earlier than usual, for the winter of 1477 was one of un

precedented mildness, ice and snow having been almost unknown throughout the island. In Iceland, the most hospitable of countries, a stranger like Colon, intelligent, dignified, eagerly enquiring for information, was sure to be introduced to the Bishop immediately on his arrival. Magnus Eiolfson, who was Bishop of Skalholt, in 1477, was also, and had been ever since 1470-Abbot of the Monastery of Helgafell. That place was the centre of the district from which most of the Icelandic adventurers had, during the previous five hundred years, sailed away to the west; and there were written, and there were still carefully preserved, the oldest documents relating to Greenland, Markland, Vinland, and all the west. This visit of Colon's to Iceland was made only twenty-nine years after the date of the brief of Pope Nicholas V., addressed to the same Bishop of Skalholt, or his immediate predecessor, calling his attention to the spiritual wants of the Christians still remaining in Greenland, and urging him to recommend some one as a Bishop to the then destitute settlement. It is, in the highest degree, probable that in this northern voyage of his, Colon had personal intercourse with seamen who had been in the Greenland trade, and some of whom had even made the more distant voyage to Vinland. In fifteen years after this trip to Iceland, Christopher Colon-or Columbus-set out from Spain, on that eventful voyage which has won for him the repute of Discoverer of a New World.

About the same time that Colon was thus pursuing his researches, there was another eccentric family, living down in Bristol in the west of England, and called Cabot. They-and especially one of them-a youth named Sebastian, were also curious on the subject of geodesy, geography, and maritime discovery. They were engaged in mercantile pursuits, and the town of Bristol had, at that time, large dealings with Iceland-larger

probably than all the rest of the three kingdoms taken together. Indeed its principal trade was with Iceland, and off the coasts of that island was the field of England's principal deep-sea fisheries. These young Cabots had, from their very childhood, opportunities of talking with Icelandic 'old salts,' who had been knocking about through all the Northern Seas, and some-perhaps many-of whom had made voyages to far-away Markland, or Vinland. So it happened eventually that those Cabots got leave from King Henry VII. to spend their money in an exploratory expedition-for that is about what the arrangement with that king amounts to. And so, young Sebastian Cabot-some say the father, John, also, but certainly young Sebastian-sailed away in the year 1497, almost due west, until he discovered, upon St. John's day of that year, and landed upon the coast of Labrador, and therefore on the Continent of America. Columbus did not have the fortune to see any part of that continent until 1498. Cabot afterwards cruised up to about the 63 parallel of latitude, and then down to the coast of Caro

lina; and he, or others for him, called the whole of this extent of country simply the new found land,' just as the Northmen had formerly been in the habit of calling these western countries collectively by the same name (Nyja fundu land). Names became strangely applied and misapplied. This expression has become a proper name, and has become localized and limited to the British Island Province of Newfoundland, the Helluland' of the Norsemen. Conversely, we find the name of America originally applied to a part of the coast of Brazil, in compliment to one Americus Vespuccius, its supposed discoverer, now extended to the whole collective continents and islands of the Western Hemisphere.

NOTE. To those having any acquaintance with the celebrated work of Prof. Rafn, it is scarcely necessary to say, that all the historical part of the foregoing paper which treats of the early voyages of the Norsemen in America, is taken from Antiquitates Americance, sive Scriptores Septentrionales rerum Ante Columbianarum in America,' compiled by the late Prof. Charles Christian Rafn, the eminent Secretary of the Royal Danish Society of Northern Antiquaries.'

W

-D. G. Rossetti.

6

OF

F the half-dozen or so of great world-poets, whose works, to use an expression of George Eliot's-the centuries have sifted for us '-probably Sophocles is the least known and read. This is not surprising when we remember how few, comparatively, can enjoy a Greek poet in the original, while adequate translations are comparatively recent, and not yet very widely diffused. Sophocles need not, however, be an unknown author to any who have access to the translations of Professor Piumptre. For, while it is impossible really to reproduce any poem, and especially a Greek one, in another language, with so great a difference between ancient and mo. dern turns of thought, this translation conveys, perhaps, as faithful a rendering of the spirit and poetry of Sophocles, as it would be possible to put into English. In the meantime, those who have been interested in the story of Antigone, may be interested in hearing something of the poet who has told it, and whom we may justly call the noblest poet of Greece.

Every country seems to have had its Augustan Age,' when political power, national status, philosophy, literature and art seem to blossom out at once into their fullest efflorescence. Such an age was the time when Sophocles lived and wrote at Athens. Pericles, Nikias, Alcibiades, Herodotus, Thucydides, Socrates, Phidias, schylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, were among his contemporaries. Leonidas came just before, and Plato just after. It would seem as if nearly all the great names, except the blind old man of Chios himself, grouped themselves

about this wonderful period-a galaxy dazzling enough to any student of clasGreat sical history and literature. events, too, crowded as closely as great names. Sophocles could remember Marathon, and was leader of the Athenian chorus that celebrated the victory of Salamis. It is hardly too much to say that his lifetime witnessed the rise, decline, and fall. of Athens, as a Hellenic power. We can scarcely wonder that so stirring a time should have produced the great poets whose names still overshadow so many of their successors, and who have immortalized the floating legends of Heroic Greece. Lovers of Mrs. Browning's poetry will scarcely require to be reminded of the allusion, in her 'Wine of Cyprus,' to Sophocles, and his three great rivals

Oh, our Eschylus, the thunderous
How he drove the bolted breath
Through the cloud, to wedge it ponderous
In the gnarled oak beneath.

Oh, our Sophocles, the royal,

Who was born to monarch's place And who made the whole world loyal, Less by kingly power than grace.

Our Euripides, the human,

With his droppings of warm tears And his touches of things common, Till they rose to touch the spheres !

Sophocles grew up among just the influences best adapted to develop his genius-a time of great and stirring crisis, followed by an age of brilliancy for Athens, which might well kindle patriotism even in the dullest heart. Colonus, his birthplace a village about a mile and a half distant from Athens-was not more remarkable for the natural beauty which he has immortalized in Edipus at Colonus,'

than for the revered associations of the genius loci. From the sacred grove of the Eumenides,' where man's foot never treads,' there was the fabled descent to Hades itself. The shrines of Posciden and Prometheus were close at hand. As a boy he was trained in the exercises of mind and body, which developed the physical and intellectual superiority of the Greeks, and twice gained the prize of a garland in competition with his comrades. His Hellenic perfection of form, along with his other qualifications, secured for him, at fourteen, the distinction of being appointed leader of the Chorus at the celebration of the victory of Salamis. Poetry, art, and military glory combined their influence with religion and patriotism, to develop his youthful genius. He must have listened with quickening pulses and poet's delight in true poetry, to the dramas of his master, Eschylus, which drew fascinated multitudes to the theatre on the great Dionysiac festivals, and were one of the main educating influences of the day. These sublime tragedies must have had no little influence on his own latent dramatic powers, which grew in silence, till at length the young poet, at the age of twenty-seven, produced his first drama -Triptolemus-and eclipsed his master. As years passed, he must have watched with keen æsthetic delight the growing glories of the Parthenon crowning the Acropolis, under the magic touch of Phidias-possibly even occasionally suggesting the subject or the treatment of a bas-relief. he grew older, he may often have lingered under the olives of the Academeia to listen to the strange questionings of the great teacher, Socrates, on some of the same dark problems that had ever haunted his own mind, and with whom, despite great difference of temperament, he must have had so much in common.

And as

In those early days of the drama, the tragedian had a great deal more to do than to write his tragedies. He

was, besides, not only stage manager and orchestra leader, but chief actor also. He must train the Chorus, provide the masks, decorations, and dresses, and arrange everything for its presentation in a manner fitted to please a most critical audience. Sophocles, however, did not act his own plays, partly because his voice was not strong enough for the great strain required in open-air acting-partly, as Professor Plumptre suggests, because he felt the functions of actor and author to be distinct. He introduced considerable changes into the form of the drama-discarded the trilogical form, by making each tragedy complete in itself, enlarged the number of speakers permissible on the stage at once, to three instead of two, and curtailed the inordinate length of the choral odes, making them at the same time more appropriate to the subject of the action, and more carefully elaborated. The drama, therefore, reached a perfection of form in the hands of Sophocles, which the Titanic but rather chaotic genius of Eschylus could not have given it. The two were indeed very different in their charac teristics. Eschylus was an unconscious and sponstaneous genius. Sophocles himself said, Eschylus did what was right without knowing why he did it, whereas Sophocles patiently worked out his conception with reference to the underlying principles of dramatic art, accomplishing a result which is considered the ideal perfection of the tragic muse.

As

It is remarkable that, with Sophocles, the period of greatest productiveness and perfection should have been the latter half of his life, to which all his extant tragedies belong. Had he died as young as did Byron, Keats or Shelley, we should have had little left to testify to his commanding genius. But he was only twenty-seven when he gained his great victory over Eschylus, who had reigned supreme as poet-laureate for a generation. The occasion of the contest was one of in

tense interest, for it was much more than a competition between a junior and a senior poet. As has been well

said, 'it was a contest between the new and the old styles of tragic poetry, in which the competitors were the greatest dramatists, with one exception, who ever lived, and the umpires were the first men, in position and education, of a state in which almost every citizen had a nice perception of the beauties of poetry and art.' The time was a politically exciting one. Cimon had just returned from the expedition to Skyros, bringing with him the bones of Thesues, and entered the theatre at the great Dionysiac festival at the moment when the Archon Eponymus was about to elect, by lot, the judges who were to decide the contest in which party feeling ran high. As the Athenian general with his nine colleagues entered, to perform the customary libations to Dionysus, the Archon, by a happy inspiration, fixed on the new comers, and administered to them the oath appointed for the judges in dramatic contests. They decided in favour of the young débutant, and Eschylus, mortified by the defeat, left Athens and retired to Sicily, where he died six years later, leaving his rival to reign unchallenged for twenty eight years, till he, in his turn, had to yield to his junior and inferior, Euripides.

It was in the very year before this defeat, that he brought out the finest of his extant dramas, the Antigone, which, as has been already said, gained him the crowning distinction of his life, his appointment as one of the ten of whom Pericles was leader, on the expedition against Samos, where he is believed to have come in contact with Herodotus. The exciting period of the Peloponnesian war, seems to have stimulated his poetic activity, and at its close we find him, like the other patriotic literary men of his time, endeavouring to resist the approach of anarchy, and stay the impending ruin by taking refuge in an oligarchy; not

from aristocratic predilections, but simply as a last resort. He seems to have assented to the Council of the Four Hundred, while, acknowledging the measure to be an evil one, simply because he saw no better course. Edipus at Colonus was his last tragedy the subject having a special fitness for a poet who seems himself to have learned wisdom with advancing age-and, it would seem, contains the ripest fruit of his mellowing exper iences. It is pathetically associated with the history of a family quarrel which must have very much clouded the happiness of his later life-caused by the jealousy his son and heir entertained of the regard of Sophocles for his grandson, Sophocles the younger. The living poet was even summoned before a court having jurisdiction over family affairs, on the ground that his mind was affected by advancing age. His answer was: If I am Sophocles I am not beside myself, and if I am beside myself, I am not Sophocles ;' and then to recite the magnificent Choral Ode in which he praises the beauty of his native Colonus-which so impressed the judges that they dismissed the case and rebuked the unfilial plaintiff. As the drama in question was not then finished, it is probable that the scene between Edipsus and his son Polynikes contains traces of this bitter experience of his own of 'a thankless child.' Probably, too, the touching pleadings of Antigone for her brother may have been an echo of the pleadings of his own heart for the forgiveness of his undutiful son :