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metres, and a long practice has enabled the Icelanders to detect at once
the least flaw in the alliteration and assonance of verse. Indeed, most
Icelanders may be said to have at one time or other of their life turned
a rima-verse as neatly as a Welshman an “englyn“; for the art of
verse-making is at present as high in reputation among the Icelanders
as ever. The greatest Icelandic poet now living, Mr. Einar Benediktsson,
 has rendered homage to the rima by composing one himself (about
 160 stanzas) in the most intricate rima-metre (sléttubdnd, palindrome).
 And though the more complicated metrical forms have for the
second-rate poet proved so difficult to handle as sometimes to necessitate
 the sacrifice of both thought and natural sequence of words,
it is none ihe less true that much of the finest and most vigorous
poetry in our language is composed in elaborate metres. — The forms
based on the old metrical rules have always been faithfully adhered
to, though foreign influences have now and then for a short space of
time dulled the ear and tempted to easier metre and a less polished
rime. This was the case with the Danish ballads introduced into Iceland
 in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They were slipshod translations,
 which enjoyed some popularity for a time, but soon receded
into oblivion. The same fate awaited the Lutheran hymns (of foreign
origin) with which the country was flooded during, and some time
after, the Reformation. They were poor translations marred by extremely
 faulty rimes, though the metres themselves were for the most
part new and good. The national tendency soon asserted itself; the
hymns were gradually recast, and bishop Gudbrandur Thorliksson
(1542--1627), the great champion of Lutheranism in Iceland, even
went so far as to have certain portions of the Bible turned into metrical
 form (rimur) so as to make them current coin among the people.
But native hymns which soon arose, though poor enough at first, gradually
 developed considerably, and reached their highest level in the
Passion-Hymns of the Rev. Hallgrimur Pétursson (1614— 1674) who
with his intensity of feeling, his inexhaustible wealth of imagery and
wise thought is by far the greatest religious poet Iceland ever
produced. But he is also great in his secular poetry, much of which
still lives on the lips of the people. His Passion-Hymns went into their
forty-sixth edition on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
poet's death. Every year, almost down to the present day, these hymns
have been sung at family worship in every Icelandic home, and have
thus been to the people an ever-flowing fountain of faith and wise
thoughts.