ughly. Their laws of
action are purely human, and we do not find them one half so unnatural
as our neighbor that has a splay foot or a hunchback. The Northern
witches, however, are formed like human females, but obey unknown and
mysterious powers. The commonest words and associations of men are bans
to them. Only so long do they have power as nothing human disturbs and
overthrows their supernatural spells.

Again let us look for a moment at another division of Grecian fiction.
The grim Cyclops who toils for Vulcan, working like mortal men, and
forging divine things, it is true, like any Grecian blacksmith, has a
counterpart of a somewhat different character in the North. The reality
and vividness of the Greek changes as we approach the Pole. In deep
caverns distorted, strange little dwarfs work by the aid of supernatural
powers wondrous weapons, swords of incredible qualities, armor that
defies mortal blades, bracelets of wondrous and cunning finish and
singular properties--all here is miraculous, the workman, the process,
and the work. The vividness with which Homer presents to us the one-eyed
Polyphemus, with his tree-staff and his ponderous body, is exchanged by
the Scandinavian for smallness, indistinctness of form and of power. The
grand in the South is obtained by giving enlarged pictures of man as he
is; in the North, by investing him with strange, magic, mysterious
qualities. In mental as well as material nature, a general haziness of
outline conveys the idea of greatness as strongly, though in another
manner, as the sharp and perceptible outline of any thing really great.

This peculiarity we shall find running through the literature, the
character, and the mind of the two nations. The North is misty,
undefined, illimited; the Greek is clear as crystal, sharp and angular,
on every side. Its conceptions are never vague, but are tangible, real,
and human. Thus with the Greek, a vast ocean, like that they know,
encircles the whole earth, and fixes its bounds and the limits which man
shall not pass; the Northerns compassed it about with a vast serpent of
immense size, which bounded infinity and space, time and eternity,
thereby mirroring, in some degree, as it were, the ancient symbol for
time and space without end, the snake biting his own tail, the circle
with no one beginning nor end. The heaven of the Greeks is the summit of
one of their own mountains, known to every peasant and inhabitant.
Accessible only to