CHAMBERS'
EDINBURGH JOURNAL

TRACINGS OF THE NORTH OF EUROPE.

VOYAGE TO COPENHAGEN.

Ever since the end of a very pleasant excursion inRhineland and Switzerland in 1848, I had set apart thesummer of the present year for a more extended tour,which should embrace the principal German cities andItaly. When the time came, however, those parts ofthe continent were in such a volcanic state, that unlessI had had a decided taste for walking over hot cindersand lava ('incedere per ignes'), there was no chance ofgetting along with any degree of comfort. In thesecircumstances, I turned my thoughts to a part of Europewhich is not perhaps possessed of so many attractions,but which at least had the merit of being sufficientlycool for the foot of the English traveller—namely,the group of countries which rank under the generalappellative of Scandinavia. In England these countriesare generally regarded as only too cool—which is notaltogether true either—and they are accordingly littlevisited. But here, again, lay a reconciling consideration;for, if neglected, they were just so much the more recherchésto the person who should make his way intothem. I also reflected on the singular social conditionof Norway as a curious study for such a wanderer asmyself: it would, I thought, be deeply interesting totry and ascertain if a democratic constitution, and theabsence of a law of primogeniture, really did renderthat country the paradise which it appears to be in thepages of Samuel Laing. Then there were some curiousgeological and archæological studies to be pursued inScandinavia. One large lump of it is supposed to beplaying a sort of game of see-saw, to the great inconvenienceof mariners in the adjacent seas; while another,though now steady, appears to have at some formerperiod been engaged in the same strange procedure.According to some philosophers, there had been a timewhen a sheet of ice had p

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