, "_Va
bon train_; thou art driving M. de Voltaire." At Paris his carriage is
'the nucleus of a comet, whose train fills whole streets.' The ladies
pluck a hair or two from his fur, to keep it as a sacred relic. There
was nothing highest, beautifulest, noblest in all France, that did not
feel this man to be higher, beautifuler, nobler.

Yes, from Norse Odin to English Samuel Johnson, from the divine
Founder of Christianity to the withered Pontiff of Encyclopedism, in
all times and places, the Hero has been worshipped. It will ever be
so. We all love great men; love, venerate, and bow down submissive
before great men: nay can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah,
does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing
reverence to what is really above him? No nobler or more blessed
feeling dwells in man's heart. And to me it is very cheering to
consider that no sceptical logic, or general triviality, insincerity
and aridity of any Time and its influences can destroy this noble
inborn loyalty and worship that is in man. In times of unbelief, which
soon have to become times of revolution, much down-rushing, sorrowful
decay and ruin is visible to everybody. For myself in these days, I
seem to see in this indestructibility of Hero-worship the everlasting
adamant lower than which the confused wreck of revolutionary things
cannot fall. The confused wreck of things crumbling and even crashing
and tumbling all round us in these revolutionary ages, will get down
so far; _no_ farther. It is an eternal corner-stone, from which they
can begin to build themselves up again. That man, in some sense or
other, worships Heroes; that we all of us reverence and must ever
reverence Great Men: this is, to me, the living rock amid all
rushings-down whatsoever;--the one fixed point in modern revolutionary
history, otherwise as if bottomless and shoreless.

* * * * *

So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the
spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations.
Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the
Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms,
is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set
forth. I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting
than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in
these regions of Europe till the eleventh century: eight-hundred