saying, were longing to
say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep,
round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so! Joyful to men as the
dawning of day from night;--_is_ it not, indeed, the awakening for them
from no-being into being, from death into life? We still honor such a
man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth: but to these wild men he was
a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a
Prophet, a God!--Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds
itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation
after generation,--till its full stature is reached, and _such_ System
of Thought can grow no farther; but must give place to another.

For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we
fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a
Hero, of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known
bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking;
and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless gratitude,
would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the
sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of their own
destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to
look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodious by him;
he first has made Life alive!--We may call this Odin, the origin of
Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore
while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated,
a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing,
while it continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but
invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility
in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all
others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world--!

One other thing we must not forget; it will explain, a little, the
confusion of these Norse Eddas. They are not one coherent System of
Thought; but properly the _summation_ of several successive systems. All
this of the old Norse Belief which is flung out for us, in one level of
distance in the Edda, like a picture painted on the same canvas, does
not at all stand so in the reality. It stands rather at all manner of
distances and depths, of successive generations since the Belief first
began. All Scandinavian thinkers, since the first of them, contr