XII.] HARALD HAARFAGER. 215 



noways connected with the neat green villas, the rectangular 

 streets, and the obtrusive warehouses. These signs of a 

 modern humdrum prosperity seemed to melt away before my 

 eyes as I gazed from the schooner's deck, and the accessories 

 of an elder time came to furnish the landscape; — the clumsy 

 merchantmen lazily swaying with the tide, darkened into 

 armed galleys with their rows of glittering shields, — the snug, 

 bourgeois-looking town shrank into the quaint proportions 

 of the huddled ancient Nidaros, — and the old marauding 

 days, with their shadowy line of grand old pirate kings, rose 

 up with welcome vividness before my mind. 



What picture shall I try to conjure from the past, to live 

 in your fancy, as it does in mine ? 



Let the setting be these very hills, — flooded by this same 

 cold, steely sunshine. In the midst stands a stalwart form, 

 in quaint but regal attire. Hot blood deepens the colour of 

 his sun-bronzed cheek; an iron purpose gleams in his earnest 

 eyes, like the flash of a drawn sword ; a circlet of gold binds 

 the massive brow, and from beneath it stream to below his 

 waist thick masses of hair, of that dusky red which glows like 

 the heart of a furnace in the sunlight, but deepens earth- 

 brown in the shadow. By his side stands a fair woman ; her 

 demure and heavy-lidded eyes are seldom lifted from the 

 earth, which yet they seem to scorn ; but the king's eyes rest 

 on her, and many looks are turned towards him. A multi- 

 tude is present, moved by one great event, swayed by a 

 thousand passions; — some with garrulous throats full of base 

 adulation and an unworthy joy; — some pale, self-scorning, 

 with averted looks, and hands that twitch instinctively at their 

 idle daggers, then drop hopeless, harmless at their sides. 



The king is Harald Haarfager, "of the fair hair;" the 

 woman is proud and beautiful Gyda, whose former scorn for 

 him, in the days when he was nothing but the petty chief of 

 a few barren mountains, provoked that strange wild vow of 

 his, " That he would never clip or comb his locks till he 

 could woo her as sole king of Norway." 



Among the crowd are those who have bartered, for ease, 



