Page:Foreign Tales and Traditions (Volume 1).djvu/12

 Otmar, “have taken their tone and colouring from the aspect and character of our country. Amidst thick gloomy forests, impervious to the light of heaven,—upon solitary heaths and cheerless marshes, whose overhanging vapours obscure the bright sky and cast their gloom alike over the eye and spirit of men, need we wonder to find the fancy dwelling upon the stern and mournful? What too must be the character of a people’s traditions whose earliest festivals were celebrated by deeds of violence and the immolation of human victims,—whose history throughout a long series of ages was but the record of outrages and oppressions mutually inflicted,—whose living generation yet remembers to have heard, in the tales of its grandsires, of wolves and bears entering into the houses of men and tearing the babe from its nurse’s arms, or of the marauding exploits of robbers more savage than the beasts of the field?” And yet amid all this monstrosity and gloominess of conception, there are occasional gleams of a warm and sprightly imagination,—sunbeams of fancy, which ever and anon cast a warm and beautiful radiance over these apocryphal mysteries. And not inconsistent with this character is the fondness which it has always manifested for the description of splendour, wealth, and gorgeous pageantry—which seems, indeed, as distinctive of the character as the taste for the grim and the awful. The truth is, that the association of contrast will be found to operate as strongly among all