all full of hoar-frost; splits pillars with the very glance of
his eye; Thor, after much rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps it on
his head; the 'handles of it reach down to his heels.' The Norse Skald
has a kind of loving sport with Thor. This is the Hymir whose cattle,
the critics have discovered, are Icebergs. Huge untutored Brobdignag
genius,--needing only to be tamed-down; into Shakspeares, Dantes,
Goethes! It is all gone now, that old Norse work,--Thor the
Thunder-god changed into Jack the Giant-killer: but the mind that made
it is here yet. How strangely things grow, and die, and do not die!
There are twigs of that great world-tree of Norse Belief still
curiously traceable. This poor Jack of the Nursery, with his
miraculous shoes of swiftness, coat of darkness, sword of sharpness,
he is one. _Hynde Etin_, and still more decisively _Red Etin of
Ireland_, in the Scottish Ballads, these are both derived from
Norseland; _Etin_ is evidently a _Joetun_. Nay, Shakspeare's _Hamlet_
is a twig too of this same world-tree; there seems no doubt of that.
Hamlet, _Amleth_, I find, is really a mythic personage; and his
Tragedy, of the poisoned Father, poisoned asleep by drops in his ear,
and the rest, is a Norse mythus! Old Saxo, as his wont was, made it a
Danish history; Shakspeare, out of Saxo, made it what we see. That is
a twig of the world-tree that has _grown_, I think;--by nature or
accident that one has grown!

In fact, these old Norse songs have a _truth_ in them, an inward
perennial truth and greatness,--as, indeed, all must have that can
very long preserve itself by tradition alone. It is a greatness not of
mere body and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is a
sublime uncomplaining melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A
great free glance into the very deeps of thought. They seem to have
seen, these brave old Northmen, what Meditation has taught all men in
all ages, That this world is after all but a show,--a phenomenon or
appearance, no real thing. All deep souls see into that,--the Hindoo
Mythologist, the German Philosopher,--the Shakspeare, the earnest
Thinker, wherever he may be:

'We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!'

One of Thor's expeditions, to Utgard (the _Outer_ Garden, central seat
of Joetun-land), is remarkable in this respect. Thialfi was with him,
and Loke. After various adventures they entered upon Giant-land;
wandered over plains, wild uncultivated places, among stones