nexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!--Thought
once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of
Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation,--till
its full stature is reached, and _such_ System of Thought can grow no
farther, but must give place to another.

For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we
fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a
Hero, of worth _im_measurable; admiration for whom, transcending the
known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate
Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless
gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them
the sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of their
own destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here,
what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodious
by him; he first has made Life alive!--We may call this Odin, the
origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse
Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe
once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows,
keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds it
lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it
starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world, the
great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker
in the world!--

One other thing we must not forget; it will explain, a little, the
confusion of these Norse Eddas. They are not one coherent System of
Thought; but properly the _summation_ of several successive systems.
All this of the old Norse Belief which is flung-out for us, in one
level of distance in the Edda, like a picture painted on the same
canvas, does not at all stand so in the reality. It stands rather at
all manner of distances and depths, of successive generations since
the Belief first began. All Scandinavian thinkers, since the first of
them, contributed to the Scandinavian System of Thought; in ever-new
elaboration and addition, it is the combined work of them all. What
history it had, how it changed from shape to shape, by one thinker's
contribution after another, till it got to the full final shape we see
it under in the _Edda_, no man will now ever know: _its_ Councils of
Trebisond, Councils of Trent, Athanasiuses, Dantes, Luthers, are sunk
without