ANCIENT LITERATUKE. 
51 
barrack we had just left, and its solitary inmates, 
should have set me thinking of the men and women 
“ of a thousand summers back,” it is necessary I 
should tell you a little about this same Snorro Stur- 
leson, whose memory so haunted me. 
Colonized as Iceland had been,—not, as is generally 
the case when a new land is brought into occupation, 
by the poverty-stricken dregs of a redundant population, 
nor by a gang of outcasts and ruffians, expelled from 
the bosom of a society which they contaminated,—but 
by men who in their own land had been both rich and 
noble,—with possessions to be taxed, and a spirit too 
haughty to endure taxation,—already acquainted with 
whatever of refinement and learning the age they lived 
in was capable of supplying,—it is not surprising that 
we should find its inhabitants, even from the first 
infancy of the republic, endowed with an amount of 
intellectual energy hardly to be expected in so secluded 
a community. 
Perhaps it was this very seclusion which stimu¬ 
lated into almost miraculous exuberance the mental 
powers already innate in the people. Undistracted 
during several successive centuries by the bloody wars, 
e 2 
