egory and Poetic Delineation, as I said
above, cannot be religious Faith; the Faith itself must first be
there, then Allegory enough will gather round it, as the fit body
round its soul. The Norse Faith, I can well suppose, like other
Faiths, was most active while it lay mainly in the silent state, and
had not yet much to say about itself, still less to sing.

Among those shadowy _Edda_ matters, amid all that fantastic congeries
of assertions, and traditions, in their musical Mythologies, the main
practical belief a man could have was probably not much more than
this: of the _Valkyrs_ and the _Hall of Odin_; of an inflexible
_Destiny_; and that the one thing needful for a man was _to be brave_.
The _Valkyrs_ are Choosers of the Slain: a Destiny inexorable, which
it is useless trying to bend or soften, has appointed who is to be
slain; this was a fundamental point for the Norse believer;--as indeed
it is for all earnest men everywhere, for a Mahomet, a Luther, for a
Napoleon too. It lies at the basis this for every such man; it is the
woof out of which his whole system of thought is woven. The _Valkyrs_;
and then that these _Choosers_ lead the brave to a heavenly _Hall of
Odin_; only the base and slavish being thrust elsewhither, into the
realms of Hela the Death-goddess: I take this to have been the soul of
the whole Norse Belief. They understood in their heart that it was
indispensable to be brave; that Odin would have no favour for them,
but despise and thrust them out, if they were not brave. Consider too
whether there is not something in this! It is an everlasting duty,
valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave. _Valour_ is
still _value_. The first duty of a man is still that of subduing
_Fear_. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A
man's acts are slavish, not true but specious: his very thoughts are
false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he have got Fear
under his feet. Odin's creed, if we disentangle the real kernel of it,
is true to this hour. A man shall and must be valiant; he must march
forward, and quit himself like a man--trusting imperturbably in the
appointment and _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 valour of the old Northmen.
Snorro tells us they thought it a shame and misery not to die in
batt