Part 38 (1/2)
”In America,” Newman reflected, ”lads of twenty-five and thirty have old heads and young hearts, or at least, young morals; abroad they have young heads and very aged hearts, morals the most grizzled and wrinkled.”--Henry James Jr., _The Americans_ (1877).
=Newton.=
Newton ... declared, with all his grand discoveries recent, That he himself felt only ”like a youth Picking up sh.e.l.ls by the great ocean, truth.”
Byron, _Don Juan_, vii. 5 (1824).
Newton discovered the prismatic colors of light, and explained the phenomenon by the emission theory.
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night.
G.o.d said, ”Let Newton be,” and all was light.
Pope, _Epitaph, intended for Newton's Monument in Westminster Abbey_ (1727).
Newton is called by Campbell ”The Priest of Nature.”--_Pleasures of Hope_, i. (1799).
=Newton and the Apple.= It is said that Newton was standing in the garden of Mrs. Conduitt, of Woolsthorpe, in the year 1665, when an apple fell from a tree and set him thinking. From this incident he ultimately developed his theory of gravitation.
=Nibelung=, a mythical king of Nibelungeland (_Norway_). He had twelve paladins, all giants. Siegfried [_Sege.freed_], prince of the Netherlands, slew the giants, and made Nibelungeland tributary.--_Nibelungen Lied_, iii. (1210).
=Nibelungen h.o.a.rd=, a mythical ma.s.s of gold and precious stones which Siegfried [_Sege.freed_], prince of the Netherlands, took from Nibelungeland and gave to his wife as a dowry. The h.o.a.rd filled thirty-six wagons. After the murder of Siegfried, Hagan seized the h.o.a.rd, and, for concealment, sank it in the ”Rhine at Lockham,”
intending to recover it at a future period, but Hagan was a.s.sa.s.sinated, and the h.o.a.rd was lost for ever.--_Nibelungen Lied_, xix.
=Nibelungen Lied= [_Ne.by-lung.'nleed_], the German _Iliad_ (1210). It is divided into two parts, and thirty-two lieds or cantos. The first part ends with the death of Siegfried, and the second part with the death of Kriemhild.
Siegfried, the youngest of the kings of the Netherlands, went to Worms, to crave the hand of Kriemhild in marriage. While he was staying with Gunther, king of Burgundy (the lady's brother), he a.s.sisted him to obtain in marriage Brunhild, queen of Issland, who announced publicly that he only should be her husband who could beat her in hurling a spear, throwing a huge stone, and in leaping. Siegfried, who possessed a cloak of invisibility, aided Gunther in these three contests, and Brunhild became his wife. In return for these services, Gunther gave Siegfried his sister Kriemhild, in marriage. After a time, the bride and bridegroom went to visit Gunther, when the two ladies disputed about the relative merits of their respective husbands, and Kriemhild, to exalt Siegfried, boasted that Gunther owed to him his victories and his wife.
Brunhild, in great anger, now employed Hagan to murder Siegfried, and this he did by stabbing him in the back while he was drinking from a brook.
Thirteen years elapsed, and the widow married Etzel, king of the Huns.
After a time, she invited Brunhild and Hagan to a visit. Hagan, in this visit, killed Etzel's young son, and Kriemhild was like a fury. A battle ensued, in which Gunther and Hagan were made prisoners, and Kriemhild cut off both their heads with her own hand. Hildebrand, horrified at this act of blood, slew Kriemhild; and so the poem ends.--Authors unknown (but the story pieced together by the minnesingers).
? The _Volsunga Saga_ is the Icelandic version of the _Nibelungen Lied_.
This saga has been translated into English by William Morris.
The _Nibelungen Lied_ has been ascribed to Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a minnesinger; but it certainly existed before that epoch, if not as a complete whole, in separate lays, and all that Heinrich von Ofterdingen could have done was to collect the floating lays, connect them, and form them into a complete story.
F. A. Wolf, in 1795, wrote a learned book to prove that Homer did for the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ what Ofterdingen did for the _Nibelungen Lied_.
Richard Wagner composed a series of operas founded on the Nibelungen Lied.
=Nibelungen Not=, the second part of the _Nibelungen Lied_, containing the marriage of Kriemhild with Etzel, the visit of the Burgundians to the court of the Hun, and the death of Gunther, Hagan, Kriemhild, and others. This part contains eighty-three four-line stanzas more than the first part. The number of lines in the two parts is 9836; so that the poem is almost as long as Milton's _Paradise Lost_.