Relics of AnliijuUy 49 



soon as we learn to understand them, scarcely less than 

 belongs to more imposing monuments. The cathedrals, 

 the walls, the towers, and Eath-houses of Germany 

 carry us back to the middle ages. Half the towns in 

 Germany have only just awoke from the sleep into 

 which they were thrown at the beginning of the 

 tifteenth century. Unfortunately, now they have 

 awaked, and we must anticipate a day not distant when 

 Llineburg and Lilbeck, Hildesheim and Dantzig ; when 

 Nuremberg and Heilbronn and Innspriick will pre- 

 serve as little of the past (they can never lose all trace 

 of it) as Cologne now does — Cologne which we can, 

 most of us, remember while it was still in great part 

 surrounded by its M'alls. Norway possesses few such 

 monuments of antiquity ; of what she does possess I 

 shall speak hereafter when we come to that period of 

 her history ; but there is an antiquity of a much vaster 

 stretch suggested by ships like the Norse ships, which 

 have still so much in common with the vessels which 

 navigated the Baltic five hundred years before Christ ; 

 with houses like the Norse ones, which seem to bring 

 us back to the very beginning of the art of house- 

 architecture, or which make us think of the ambulant 

 dwellings of the Goths; of those great wagons in 

 which they made their migrations over Europe, and 

 which seem now to have only stayed for a moment on 

 their wanderings. 



From the house we pass to the group of houses form- 

 ing a homestead or a village. There are some special 

 peculiarities of Norwegian country life, and of the 

 settlement of the country, which distinguish that land 

 even from Sweden, and, indeed, from the other countries 



D 



