d _choice_ of the
upper Powers; and, on the whole, not fear at all. Now and always, the
completeness of his victory over Fear will determine how much of a man
he is.

It is doubtless very savage that kind of valor of the old Northmen.
Snorro tells us they thought it a shame and misery not to die in battle;
and if natural death seemed to be coming on, they would cut wounds in
their flesh, that Odin might receive them as warriors slain. Old kings,
about to die, had their body laid into a ship; the ship sent forth,
with sails set and slow fire burning it; that, once out at sea, it might
blaze up in flame, and in such manner bury worthily the old hero, at
once in the sky and in the ocean! Wild bloody valor; yet valor of
its kind; better, I say, than none. In the old Sea-kings too, what an
indomitable rugged energy! Silent, with closed lips, as I fancy them,
unconscious that they were specially brave; defying the wild ocean with
its monsters, and all men and things;--progenitors of our own Blakes
and Nelsons! No Homer sang these Norse Sea-kings; but Agamemnon's was
a small audacity, and of small fruit in the world, to some of them;--to
Hrolf's of Normandy, for instance! Hrolf, or Rollo Duke of Normandy, the
wild Sea-king, has a share in governing England at this hour.

Nor was it altogether nothing, even that wild sea-roving and battling,
through so many generations. It needed to be ascertained which was
the _strongest_ kind of men; who were to be ruler over whom. Among the
Northland Sovereigns, too, I find some who got the title _Wood-cutter_;
Forest-felling Kings. Much lies in that. I suppose at bottom many of
them were forest-fellers as well as fighters, though the Skalds talk
mainly of the latter,--misleading certain critics not a little; for no
nation of men could ever live by fighting alone; there could not produce
enough come out of that! I suppose the right good fighter was oftenest
also the right good forest-feller,--the right good improver, discerner,
doer and worker in every kind; for true valor, different enough from
ferocity, is the basis of all. A more legitimate kind of valor that;
showing itself against the untamed Forests and dark brute Powers of
Nature, to conquer Nature for us. In the same direction have not we
their descendants since carried it far? May such valor last forever with
us!

That the man Odin, speaking with a Hero's voice and heart, as with an
impressiveness out of Heaven, told his People t