350 
LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES. 
in a personal friend. The old Chronicle lingers with 
such loving minuteness over his attaching qualities,— 
his social, generous nature,—his gaiety and “ frolicsome¬ 
ness even his finical taste in dress, and his evident 
proneness to fall too hastily in love, have a value in the 
portrait, as contrasting with the gloomy colours in 
which the story sinks at last. The warm, impulsive 
spirit speaks in every action of his life, from the hour 
when—a young child, in exile—he strikes his axe 
into the skull of his foster-father’s murderer—to the last 
grand scene near Svalderoe. You trace it in his ab¬ 
sorbing grief for the death of Geyra, the wife of his 
youth; the saga says, “ he had no pleasure in Vinland 
after it,” and then naively observes, “ he therefore pro¬ 
vided himself with war-ships, and went a-plundering,” 
one of his first achievements being to go and pull down 
London bridge. This peculiar kind of “ distraction ” (as 
the French call it) seems to have had the desired effect, 
as is evident in the romantic incident of his second 
marriage, when the Irish Princess Gyda chooses him— 
apparently an obscure stranger—to be her husband out 
of a hundred wealthy and well-born aspirants to her 
hand. But neither Gyda’s love, nor the rude splen- 
