nce. At the foot of it, in the
Death-kingdom, sit three _Nornas_, Fates,--the Past, Present, Future;
watering its roots from the Sacred Well. Its 'boughs,' with their
buddings and disleafings,--events, things suffered, things done,
catastrophes,--stretch through all lands and times. Is not every leaf
of it a biography, every fibre there an act or word? Its boughs are
Histories of Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of Human
Existence, onwards from of old. It grows there, the breath of Human
Passion rustling through it;--or stormtost, the stormwind howling
through it like the voice of all the gods. It is Igdrasil, the Tree of
Existence. It is the past, the present, and the future; what was done,
what is doing, what will be done; 'the infinite conjugation of the
verb _To do_.' Considering how human things circulate, each
inextricably in communion with all,--how the word I speak to you
to-day is borrowed, not from Ulfila the Moesogoth only, but from all
men since the first man began to speak,--I find no similitude so true
as this of a Tree. Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great. The
'_Machine_ of the Universe,'--alas, do but think of that in contrast!

* * * * *

Well, it is strange enough this old Norse view of Nature; different
enough from what we believe of Nature. Whence it specially came, one
would not like to be compelled to say very minutely! One thing we may
say: It came from the thoughts of Norse men;--from the thought, above
all, of the _first_ Norse man who had an original power of thinking.
The First Norse 'man of genius,' as we should call him! Innumerable
men had passed by, across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder,
such as the very animals may feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly
inquiring wonder, such as men only feel;--till the great Thinker came,
the _original_ man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the
slumbering capability of all into Thought. It is ever the way with the
Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from
saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from
painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even
so! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night; _is_ it not,
indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death
into life? We still honour such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so
forth: but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of
miraculous u