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To the service of these divinities the priesthood, the Druids, were consecrated, and beside them the bards, or poets, held a more independent place. From the union of heaven and earth, there springs the god Thunar or Donar among the Germans, Thor among the Norsemen, the bold god of thunder who wages war against the enemies of gods and men.
Thus, probably, was removed the cause of many quarrels; but, at the same time, this stern lawgiver destroyed the influence which the songs of those rival national bards exercised over the martial virtues and literary genius of their countrymen. The visit of the Omra was likewise an ancient custom.
These were the materials which Kalidasa, the Attic dramatists, and the bards of the Nibelungen found ready, awaiting their artistic treatment. But the mythology of the New World, with all its pretty and agreeable naivete, affords hardly enough, either of variety in situation or of complexity in motive, for a grand epic or a genuine tragedy.
The bards held an important post in the festal banquets, where they flattered the pride of the princes by singing the exploits of their forefathers. POEMS OF HOMER. Although seven cities contended for the honor of giving birth to Homer, it was the prevalent belief, in the flourishing times of Greece, that he was a native of Smyrna.
If we were to receive the chronology while rejecting the embellishments of the Bards, Turgesius must have first come to Ireland with one of the expeditions of the year 820, since they speak of him as having been "the scourge of the country for seventeen years," before he assumed the command of the forces landed from the fleet of 837.
In poetry, the insipid and immoral songs of the Provençal bards gave place to the immortal productions of the great creators of the European languages. Dante led the way in Italy, and gave to the world the "Divine Comedy" a masterpiece of human genius, which raised him to the rank of Homer and Virgil.
In the midst of matchless beauties he heard the matchless strains of his native land, and the echoes of her old hills responding to the triumphs of her old bards. The air, too, bore with it historic associations; it told a tale of wrong and of suffering. The wrong has ceased, the suffering is past, but the air which records them still lives.
They are prouder than any other nation in the world. They have a proverb, "The dirt of the earth cannot stick to the rays of the sun." They do not despise any sect, except the Brahmans, and honor only the bards who sing their military achievements.
The Finns used to try to persuade a slain bear that he had not been killed by them, but had fallen from a tree, or met his death in some other way; moreover, they held a funeral festival in his honour, at the close of which bards expatiated on the homage that had been paid to him, urging him to report to the other bears the high consideration with which he had been treated, in order that they also, following his example, might come and be slain.
While other bards "with Britain's hero set their souls on fire," he draws, he says, a deeper scene. Marlborough HAD BEEN considered by Britain as her HERO; but, when the "Last Day" was published, female cabal had blasted for a time the laurels of Blenheim. This serious poem was finished by Young as early as 1710, before he was thirty; for part of it is printed in the Tatler.
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