us to discover
a common origin, a universal fountain, whence proceed pure and limpid
all the streams that are contaminated by baser contact in their later
course, is a question which might mightily task the most powerful minds.
The gods of Greece and Rome are reproduced in Odin and Thor, Freia, and
Gerda and Tduna. Aphrodite at Athens, Venus on the Seven Hills, Freia in
the North, differ but in name. Dark hair and coal-black eyes, and a
warm, sunny beauty may please the ardent inhabitants of Greece and Rome;
the Swedes and Germans may bow before golden hair and blue eyes, fair
and blooming cheeks. But transport the Grecian Aphrodite to the
Dofrefield glaciers, and she will soon grow white as their snow, her
eyes will fade to the pale cold blue of their skies, and with the winter
frosts her hair will turn like fall leaves, golden yellow; and under the
sun of Italy, Freia will tan to the burning, dark-hued, voluptuous Venus
of the South. The two soils naturally breed the one cold statues, the
other passionate life, but these two different phases are in themselves
identical, Thor's hammer, and the various wonderful exploits of the
Northern gods and goddesses, their dim, ill-defined notions of creation,
of time and space, and of future worlds, are but natural growths from
the nature of the North. Their gods, like their men, are all action, and
to raise their actions above those of the human race, they naturally
invest them with peculiar supernatural physical endowments, and a
strange, mysterious mode of action. The powers of magic come to their
aid; they are not absolutely omnipotent. Dwarfs forge them invincible
arms in subterranean caverns; earth, air, fire, and water, conspire to
assist them. The elements rage or are appeased at their command.

In the same way the gods of Greece and Rome are all repose. Their
actions acquire a superiority over those of man not by supernatural
agencies or extraordinary developments of physical power; their
preeminence lies in the quiet assumption of power, in the immediate
sequence of action on volition. Their divinity is esoteric, consisting
in attributes innate and not assumed. Action with them is power; but in
the North power must be superadded.

Thus we find all the various attributes embodied in the gods of the
South, likewise deified and modified in the North, Thus Loke is the
Mercury of the ancients. He is the same sly rogue as Hermes, though he
has not some of the better qualitie