↩ The ancients asserted—and it was scarcely a fable, that ►Chronos had buried his treasures in the regions of 📌the North. And strange it is, that they should have been so little sought for there. Strange it is, though we know full well whence came the Goths, the Angles and the Normans, that we should have done so little to track them back to their ancient abodes. Their fatherland is wrapped for us in a darkness nearly as thick as 443surrounded it ere they burst out upon the fairer and richer lands of the South. Formerly, indeed, the remoter Northern world, was a world given up to the imagination of dreamers, who peopled it with prodigies and all mysterious things;—in later times, when men have learnt that man every where is man—with common hopes and fears—modified somewhat by climate, and much by civilization; even in later times, a cold and frozen barrier seems to have girdled the ancient Scandinavia—a barrier which few have been willing to burst, lest nothing should be found to repay the labour of the adventurers.