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What this Odin saw
into, and taught with his runes and his rhymes, the whole Teutonic People
laid to heart and carried forward. His way of thought became their way of
thought:--such, under new conditions, is the history of every great thinker
still. In gigantic confused lineaments, like some enormous camera-obscure
shadow thrown upwards from the dead deeps of the Past, and covering the
whole Northern Heaven, is not that Scandinavian Mythology in some sort the
Portraiture of this man Odin? The gigantic image of _his_ natural face,
legible or not legible there, expanded and confused in that manner! Ah,
Thought, I say, is always Thought. No great man lives in vain. The
History of the world is but the Biography of great men.
To me there is something very touching in this primeval figure of Heroism;
in such artless, helpless, but hearty entire reception of a Hero by his
fellow-men. Never so helpless in shape, it is the noblest of feelings, and
a feeling in some shape or other perennial as man himself.


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