2 Norway and the Norwegians 



power of the city by the banks of the Tiber. In the 

 plains below these mountain villages the records of an 

 antique civilisation are only just hidden from sight. 

 Scratch the ground, and you come upon traces of the 

 dead, upon vases which have been maybe brought by 

 traders from Greece, and been there manufactured in 

 the days when Sophocles still lived, and when Phidias 

 and Polycletus worked in marble. Everywhere, there- 

 fore, in lands such as these, the history of mankind has, 

 we may say, worked itself into the very soil. It is 

 impossible to dissociate man and nature, even in thought. 



But leave Italy, and travel to the Scandinavian 

 countries, and you find everything in as great contrast 

 to this as possible. Here man appears like a new 

 comer ; his civilisation, his cultivation of the soil, seem 

 to be still only attempts, only a beginning. Every 

 thing that is human seems most temporary ; man has 

 not yet made himself at home with nature. This im- 

 pression, which is stronger than anywhere else in Nor- 

 way, is heightened by what are perhaps mere accidents. 

 The houses in Norway and Sweden are not maybe 

 really slighter or more quickly built than the cottages 

 in many other countries : but they look much more 

 so. At a distance they look like wooden toy-houses, 

 scattered upon no fixed principle here and there over 

 the landscape. At best they resemble more the wooden 

 shanties which people put up in the backwoods of 

 America or the colonies, than the cottages of other 

 European countries. 



The tilling of the ground, too, appears to our eyes 

 wonderfully slight and accidental. It is at best not 

 very scientific, and to our English eyes it appears much 



