The Iceland year-book - 01.01.1926, Page 11

doubt as to whether the intellectual advancement
of the race previsioned by that supreme student of
humanity when he voiced his belief in this pos-
sibility has in any way manifested itself during the
intervening years, while it is a matter of fact that
Iceland has in the same time vastly neared the
vortex of the surging multitude. The dozens of
tourists annually visiting Iceland at that time
have now developed into as many thousands, and
the country is now inextricably enmeshed in the
net-work of international commerce. For those
who want to avoid the beaten track, Iceland has
therefore to a certain extent lost her attraction of
virgin freshness, but as she gets more widely
known, she asserts her power of attraction over an
ever-increasing number of travellers as one of the
most peculiar and most picturesque countries in
Europe. The spell which Iceland exercises over
the foreign traveller generally remains unbroken
when he has again left her shores and returned
home. He longs for another glimpse of the arc-
tic country, and if circumstances allow he fre-
quently responds to the weird attraction, even
time upon time. Thus it was that one of the nob-
lest English poetesses for nineteen consecutive
summers visited Iceland, and was starting on her
twentieth journey in 1914, when the world war
broke out and forced her to remain at home.
Another poetess, who repeatedly visited Iceland,
thus articulates her incessant longing: —
„Maiden with veil of snow,
Why (lost thou haunt me so,
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