There came at last a shadow over our memory of the bright Arcadian days. "The beautiful Scandinavian" was fatally stricken in her prime by an insidious malady which gradually sapped her strength but scarcely touched the saint-like beauty which was the glory and charm of her youth. The Great Traveler, who construed at a glance the ethnical significance of those embodied charms, has long ago passed to his eternal rest. In her children she seems to live again. Her sons—handsome young Scandinavians of the higher type—are winning success and distinction in the great industrial movements of the times; and her beautiful daughter, vividly reproducing the attractions of the mother, is a passionate lover of travel, and but recently has demonstrated the Scandinavian quality of her blood in the midst of a terrific nine days' storm that swept the seas near the coast of Japan.

With this parting glance at the impressive figures which appeared in the early pages of this paper, the "explanatory preface" comes to a close; and the reader—the patient reader—is at last introduced to a rare lexicon of Names—names which carry on their light wings the histories of States and men. Here the humblest scholar may read without effort, in almost continuous narrative, the marvelous story of three kindred stocks transmuted by the fires of internecine conflict into one invincible race, which after centuries of almost unbroken struggle in peace and in war may almost be said to have made the earth its own. What part it has played in the genesis of our own Commonwealth, each student of this "lexicon" must judge for himself, remembering that the decision of this question must rest upon a clear judicial faculty at last. Many "names" might be added, but here mere numbers do not count. "To the quick eye of genius"—says Max MÜller—"one case is like a thousand"; and it may be that the scholarly enquirer will find in the brilliant Du Chaillu an illustration of this maxim of the great German scholar.

[Pg 138]
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