ower; and is the fit name of the highest god, not of any
man. The word signifies Divinity, he says, among the old Saxon, German
and all Teutonic Nations; the adjectives formed from it all signify
_divine_, _supreme_, or something pertaining to the chief god. Like
enough! We must bow to Grimm in matters etymological. Let us consider
it fixed that _Wuotan_ means _Wading_, force of _Movement_. And now
still, what hinders it from being the name of a Heroic Man and
_Mover_, as well as of a god? As for the adjectives, and words formed
from it,--did not the Spaniards in their universal admiration for
Lope, get into the habit of saying 'a Lope flower,' a 'Lope _dama_,'
if the flower or woman were of surpassing beauty? Had this lasted,
_Lope_ would have grown, in Spain, to be an adjective signifying
_godlike_ also. Indeed, Adam Smith, in his _Essay on Language_,
surmises that all adjectives whatsoever were formed precisely in that
way: some very green thing chiefly notable for its greenness, got the
appellative name _Green_, and then the next thing remarkable for that
quality, a tree for instance, was named the _green_ tree,--as we still
say 'the _steam coach_,' 'four-horse coach,' or the like. All primary
adjectives, according to Smith, were formed in this way; were at first
substantives and things. We cannot annihilate a man for etymologies
like that! Surely there was a First Teacher and Captain; surely there
must have been an Odin, palpable to the sense at one time; no
adjective, but a real Hero of flesh and blood! The voice of all
tradition, history or echo of history, agrees with all that thought
will teach one about it, to assure us of this.

How the man Odin came to be considered a _god_, the chief god?--that
surely is a question which nobody would wish to dogmatise upon. I have
said, his people knew no _limits_ to their admiration of him; they had
as yet no scale to measure admiration by. Fancy your own generous
heart's-love of some greatest man expanding till it _transcended_ all
bounds, till it filled and overflowed the whole field of your thought!
Or what if this man Odin,--since a great deep soul, with the afflatus
and mysterious tide of vision and impulse rushing on him he knows not
whence, is ever an enigma, a kind of terror and wonder to
himself,--should have felt that perhaps _he_ was divine; that _he_ was
some effluence of the 'Wuotan,' '_Movement_,' Supreme Power and
Divinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nat