ure was the awful
Flame-image; that some effluence of _Wuotan_ dwelt here in him! He was
not necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest he
knew. A great soul, any sincere soul, knows not _what_ he
is,--alternates between the highest height and the lowest depth; can,
of all things, the least measure--Himself! What others take him for,
and what he guesses that he may be; these two items strangely act on
one another, help to determine one another. With all men reverently
admiring him; with his own wild soul full of noble ardours and
affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious new light; a
divine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him, and no man
to whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself to be?
"Wuotan?" All men answered, "Wuotan!"--

And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man
was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What an
enormous _camera-obscura_ magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in
the human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and all
that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in the
darkness, in the entire ignorance; without date or document, no book,
no Arundel-marble; only here and there some dumb monumental cairn.
Why, in thirty or forty years, were there no books, any great man
would grow _mythic_, the contemporaries who had once seen him, being
all dead. And in three-hundred years, and three-thousand years--!--To
attempt _theorising_ on such matters would profit little: they are
matters which refuse to be _theoremed_ and diagramed; which Logic
ought to know that she _cannot_ speak of. Enough for us to discern,
far in the uttermost distance, some gleam as of a small real light
shining in the centre of that enormous camera-obscura image; to
discern that the centre of it all was not a madness and nothing, but a
sanity and something.

This light, kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse mind, dark
but living, waiting only for light; this is to me the centre of the
whole. How such light will then shine out, and with wondrous
thousandfold expansion spread itself, in forms and colours, depends
not on _it_, so much as on the National Mind recipient of it. The
colours and forms of your light will be those of the _cut-glass_ it
has to shine through.--Curious to think how, for every man, any the
truest fact is modelled by the nature of the man! I said, The earnest
ma