, not
giantlike, but godlike and stronger than gianthood, of the Shakspeares,
the Goethes!--Spiritually as well as bodily these men are our
progenitors.

I like, too, that representation they have of the tree Igdrasil. All
Life is figured by them as a Tree. Igdrasil, the Ash-tree of Existence,
has its roots deep down in the kingdoms of Hela or Death; its trunk
reaches up heaven-high, spreads its boughs over the whole Universe: it
is the Tree of Existence. At the foot of it, in the Death-kingdom, sit
Three _Nornas_, Fates,--the Past, Present, Future; watering its
roots from the Sacred Well. Its "boughs," with their buddings
and disleafings?--events, things suffered, things done,
catastrophes,--stretch through all lands and times. Is not every leaf
of it a biography, every fibre there an act or word? Its boughs are
Histories of Nations. The rustle of it is the noise of Human Existence,
onwards from of old. It grows there, the breath of Human Passion
rustling through it;--or storm tost, the storm-wind howling through it
like the voice of all the gods. It is Igdrasil, the Tree of Existence.
It is the past, the present, and the future; what was done, what is
doing, what will be done; "the infinite conjugation of the verb _To
do_." Considering how human things circulate, each inextricably in
communion with all,--how the word I speak to you to-day is borrowed,
not from Ulfila the Moesogoth only, but from all men since the first
man began to speak,--I find no similitude so true as this of a Tree.
Beautiful; altogether beautiful and great. The "_Machine_ of the
Universe,"--alas, do but think of that in contrast!

Well, it is strange enough this old Norse view of Nature; different
enough from what we believe of Nature. Whence it specially came, one
would not like to be compelled to say very minutely! One thing we may
say: It came from the thoughts of Norse men;--from the thought, above
all, of the _first_ Norse man who had an original power of thinking. The
First Norse "man of genius," as we should call him! Innumerable men had
passed by, across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the
very animals may feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder,
such as men only feel;--till the great Thinker came, the _original_ man,
the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability
of all into Thought. It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual
Hero. What he says, all men were not far from