on, from which all manner of mythologies, symbolic practices,
speculations, allegories, songs and sagas would naturally grow.
Grow,--how strangely! I called it a small light shining and shaping in
the huge vortex of Norse darkness. Yet the darkness itself was
_alive_; consider that. It was the eager inarticulate uninstructed
Mind of the whole Norse People, longing only to become articulate, to
go on articulating ever farther! The living doctrine grows,
grows;--like a Banyan-tree; the first _seed_ is the essential thing:
any branch strikes itself down into the earth, becomes a new root; and
so, in endless complexity, we have a whole wood, a whole jungle, one
seed the parent of it all. Was not the whole Norse Religion,
accordingly, in some sense, what we called 'the enormous shadow of
this man's likeness'? Critics trace some affinity in some Norse
mythuses, of the Creation and suchlike, with those of the Hindoos. The
Cow Adumbla, 'licking the rime from the rocks,' has a kind of Hindoo
look. A Hindoo Cow, transported into frosty countries. Probably
enough; indeed we may say undoubtedly, these things will have a
kindred with the remotest lands, with the earliest times. Thought does
not die, but only is changed. The first man that began to think in
this Planet of ours, he was the beginner of all. And then the second
man, and the third man:--nay, every true Thinker to this hour is a
kind of Odin, teaches men _his_ way of thought, spreads a shadow of
his own likeness over sections of the History of the World.

* * * * *

Of the distinctive poetic character or merit of this Norse Mythology I
have not room to speak; nor does it concern us much. Some wild
Prophecies we have, as the _Voeluspa_ in the _Elder Edda_; of a rapt,
earnest, sibylline sort. But they were comparatively an idle adjunct
of the matter, men who as it were but toyed with the matter, these
later Skalds; and it is _their_ songs chiefly that survive. In later
centuries, I suppose, they would go on singing, poetically
symbolising, as our modern Painters paint, when it was no longer from
the innermost heart, or not from the heart at all. This is everywhere
to be well kept in mind.

Gray's fragments of Norse Lore, at any rate, will give one no notion
of it;--any more than Pope will of Homer. It is no square-built gloomy
palace of black ashlar marble, shrouded in awe and horror, as Gray
gives it us: no; rough as the North Rocks, as th