Firth

“ Now would I be laid in my mound over against King Beli's mound, down by the sea on this side the firth, whereas it may be easiest for us to cry out each to each of tidings drawing nigh.”
A little after this Thorstein departed, and was laid in mound even as he had bidden; but Frithiof took the land and chattels after him. Biorn and Asmund were Frithiof s foster-brethren; they were big and strong men both.
CHAPTER II. Frithiof wooeth Ingibiorg of those Brethren.
So Frithiof became the most famed of men, and the bravest in all things that may try a man. ”

“ Blindly, but doggedly, they stumbled onward, silent in their agony, brave to the last when worn-out nature gave way and they sank down, one after the other, till none was left alive, and only the still figures, lying face downwards on the frozen snow, bore mute witness of how they had neither faltered nor wavered in their duty, but had died, as Britons always should die, true to the end. ”

“ But ever in the colours there is something pale, a paleness which predominates with indescribable delicateness of tone in the tints of the horizon, and in the blue and white shades of the stretches of land, which contrast so strongly with the dull brown of our immediate neighbourhood, and even with the sharply defined ice wall of Snow Hill. ”

“ Fiennes was pardoned, but his military career came to an end, and he seems for a time to have left England. The ease with which the new model captured Bristol produced a change of feeling in his favour. Cromwell, Fairfax, and other chief officers, ‘upon a view of the place, comparing the present strength of it with what it was when he delivered it, and other circumstances, freely expressed themselves as men abundantly satisfied concerning the hard misfortune that befell that noble gentleman’ (Sprigge, Anglia Rediviva, p. 129) . ”

“ As the frost comes down along the coast, rocks are split asunder with a noise of big guns, and the sound goes booming away across the frozen tracts, startling the slouching bear in his lonely haunts, and causing him to give vent to his hoarse, barking roar in answer. The ice, just forming into sheets, creaks and cracks as the rising or falling tide strains it along the shore; fragments, falling loose upon it, skid across the surface with the ringing sound which travels so far. In the spring the melting ice-floes groan as they break asunder ”

“ Two hours before the dawn of the 30th of January, he rose up, and, calling to his servant Herbert, bade him dress him with care. “Let me have a shirt more than ordinary,” said he, “by reason the season is so sharp as probably may make me shake, which some will imagine proceeds from fear. I would have no such imputation; I fear not death. Death is not terrible to me. I bless my God I am prepared.”
About ten o’clock, Colonel Hacker came to fetch the King to Whitehall. Attended by Herbert and Juxon, he walked through St. ”

“ In America it was not a question between one man and a people, but whether the majority or the minority of the people should govern. "A constitutional majority is the only true sovereign of a free people," said Lincoln in his Inaugural. It was necessary, he declared, to prove this once for all. "We must settle this question now whether in a free government the minority have a right to break it up whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapacity of the people to govern themselves." ”

“ As for the people, what thoughts they have in matters of religion in their own breasts I cannot reach, but shall think it my duty, if they walk honestly and peaceably, not to cause them in the least to suller for the same.’ Cromwell trusted that these measures would be followed in time by the conversion of the Irish. ‘We find the people,’ he wrote to John Sadler, ‘very greedy after the word, and flocking to christian meetings, much of that prejudice which lies upon people in England being a stranger to their minds. ”

“ Cromwell shared the general opinion of the army that a settlement could best be obtained by negotiation with the king. Whatever the world might judge of them, he said to Berkeley, they would be found no seekers of themselves, further than to have leave to live as subjects ought to do, and to preserve their consciences, and they thought that no men could enjoy their lives and estates quietly without the king had his rights (Maseres, Tracts, i. 360) . Accordingly he exerted all his influence to render the propositions of the army acceptable to the king ”

“ The steady hum of the drifting snow, together with its movement, made the brain dizzy, and the two explorers generally found it necessary to form a camp when such a storm came on, the snow soon piling up against their shelter tent and effectually protecting them from the wind. Then, when the breeze had died away and the snow ceased moving, they were able to dig out their sledge and proceed. ”

“ Our Civil War produced the union of England, Scotland and Ireland, but excepting in the war for the reconquest of Ireland there is no trace of that feeling against the dismemberment of the State which wrought so powerfully in America. "Remember, ye hypocrites," said Cromwell in his declaration to the Irish clergy, "Ireland was once united to England. You broke that union." While Ireland was a dependency which had shaken off the bond which linked it to England, Scotland was an independent nation linked to England merely by the accident of hereditary succession. ”

“ Clarendon terms Northumberland ‘the proudest man alive,’ and adds that ‘if he had thought the king as much above him as he thought himself above other considerable men, he would have been a good subject.’ ‘He was in all his deportment a very great man,’ and throughout his political career he behaved with a dignity and independence more characteristic of a feudal potentate than a seventeenth-century nobleman. ”

“ Regarded thus the war was not a war for dominion, but one in defence of "a people's government," a war undertaken in order that "the government of the people, for the people, by the people" should not perish, and therefore essentially "a people's contest." ”

“ A war between men of the same race, who had lived for three-quarters of a century under the same government, regarded themselves as one nation, and spoke the same language, is essentially a civil war. ”

“ In March 1635 Cottington became master of the court of wards, in which capacity he ‘raised the revenue of that court to the king to be much greater than it had ever been before his administration; by which husbandry all the rich families of England, of noblemen and gentlemen, were exceedingly incensed, and even indevoted to the crown’ (Clarendon, ii. 102) . ”

“ Take two races of the same stock, both trained by free institutions and both nurtured by the same creeds, heat them in the fire of political passions, subject them to the strain and pressure of civil war, and we should expect results of much the same kind to follow. ”

“ It was necessary "to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided there can be no successful appeal back to bullets." ”

“ Cromwell saw in the midst of the English people a smaller body, "a peculiar people," "the people of God," "a people that are to God as the apple of His eye." It was the cause of "the people of God" that he had always in his mind, not that of the people in general, though he held that the interests of the two were not incompatible. Lincoln, when he qualified the word "people," spoke of "the plain people" as his special care, and of himself as their representative. One man thought of a class which included all but the whole nation; the other of a minority consisting of a number of allied sects. ”

“ Hopton was distinguished among the royalist commanders for the good order which he maintained among his soldiers. Under his command the Cornish army was so disciplined ‘as the fame of their religion and devotion was no less than their courage’ (ib. vi. 248, vii. 98) . He was remarkable also for the rare self-abnegation and fidelity with which he sacrificed his own claims and his own wishes to the good of the king's cause (ib. vii. 148) . No royalist leader was so much respected by his opponents. ”

“ Cromwell had not ceased to remind parliament of the necessity of establishing the toleration promised in the vote of September 1614. ‘Honest men served you faithfully in this action,’ he wrote after Naseby; ‘I beseech you not to discourage them. He that ventures his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the liberty of his conscience and you for the liberty he fights for’ (Letter xxix.) ”

“ In America the claim of the minority to break up the government, if they could not direct it, linked the maintenance of free government and the maintenance of the union together. "I have thought it proper," said Lincoln, "to keep the integrity of our union prominent as the primary object of the contest on our side." The "war was commenced by the South to destroy our union," and "the administration accepted the war thus commenced for the sole avowed object of preserving our union." Any nation which accepted the principles of the Southern leaders must cease to be a nation. ”

“ The first of the ice-cap was a stretch of some fifteen miles of ice, formed into enormous dome-shaped masses. They toiled up one side but travelled easily down the other, and so on, up and down, until they had attained an altitude of nearly 9000 feet above the sea-level, when they found that they were on a vast expanse of snow. The white unbroken surface stretched away as far as the eye could reach, unbroken by a ridge or rise, everywhere flat, white and immense. This was the great ice-cap, the frozen covering of the interior of Greenland, the unknown region where no man had yet set foot. ”

“ If he had died then, Cromwell's fame, though not as spotless as Washington's or Lincoln's, would have been purer than it is. The next seven years gave occasion to half his party to denounce him as an apostate, and to the next generation to regard him as a tyrant. Mr Roosevelt describes him as a man "cursed with love of power," a man who "had acquired a dictatorial habit of mind." ”

“ Amongst the noblest of the persecuted was John Frith, who whilst he stoutly held to the belief that the doctrine of transubstantiation was untrue, begged that men should be left 'to think thereon as God shall instil in any man's mind, and that neither part condemn other for this matter, but receive each other in brotherly love, reserving each other's infirmity to God.' Frith was in advance of his time as the advocate of religious liberty as well as of a special creed, and he was burnt alive. ”

“ Though he might despise insults, Cromwell could not despise the dangers with which this agitation threatened the Commonwealth. ‘You have no other way to treat these people,’ said he to the council, ‘but to break them in pieces; if you do not break them, they will break you’ (Lilburn, The Picture of the Council of State, p. 15) . His advice was followed, the leaders of the levellers were arrested, and the mutiny in the army swiftly and vigorously suppressed by himself and Fairfax (May 1649) . ”

“ So those brethren fare home with their folk, right ill content with things. But Frithiof, when he deemed that the brethren might be looked for home again, spake to the king's daughter:
“Sweetly and well have ye done to us, neither has goodman Baldur been wroth with us; but now as soon as ye wot of the kings' coming home, spread the sheets of your beds abroad on the Hall of the Goddesses, for that is the highest of all the garth, and we may see it from our stead.”
The king's daughter said: “Thou dost not after the like of any other: but certes, we welcome dear friends whenas ye come to us.” ”

“ In three letters to Sir John Bankes, Northumberland explained his position. ‘We believe that those persons who are most powerful with the king do endeavour to bring parliaments to such a condition that they shall only be made instruments to execute the commands of the king, who were established for his greatest and most supreme council. ”

“ In America, Sherman, who also regarded efficiency as the one thing that mattered, dwelt continually on the difficulty of conducting a war under a democratic form of government. He complained that the enforcement of discipline was made impossible, that politicians dictated military movements, that the press betrayed the plans of the generals, and turned the armies against their leaders. ”

“ Fairfax was willing to command against the Scots if they invaded England again, but resigned rather than attack them. ‘Human probabilities,’ he said, ‘are not sufficient grounds to make war upon a neighbour nation, especially our brethren of Scotland, to whom we are engaged in a solemn league and covenant.’ A committee of the council of state was sent to persuade him to retain his post, but he adhered to his conscientious scruples (Whitelocke, ff. 460–2) . ”

“ Old Sapt broke it by saying sadly, yet with an unmeant drollery that set Fritz and me laughing:
“Why didn’t old Rudolf the Third marry your—great-grandmother, was it?”
“Come,” said I, “it is the King we are thinking about.”
“It is true,” said Fritz.
“Moreover,” I went on, “I have been an impostor for the profit of another, but I will not be one for my own; and if the King is not alive and on his throne before the day of betrothal comes, I will tell the truth, come what may.” ”

“ Were it my object to dwell on this part of my tale, I might tell you of Fritz’s long conflict with himself—his doubts, his hesitation, and his reasonings, before he could decide on what course to take, or whither to bend his steps. The world was a very wide one to hunt after a Starling through it: that, he knew, though not very deeply skilled in geography. ”

“ In both countries, directly or indirectly, the struggle was a struggle for the maintenance of a free government, but in England the problem took the simplest and most elementary form. The question was, whether the will of one man should determine the destinies of a whole people. So at least the leaders of the republicans asserted, seeing more clearly than other men what the real issue would become. ”