ole field of your thought!
Or what if this man Odin,--since a great deep soul, with the afflatus
and mysterious tide of vision and impulse rushing on him he knows
not whence, is ever an enigma, a kind of terror and wonder to
himself,--should have felt that perhaps _he_ was divine; that _he_
was some effluence of the "Wuotan," "_Movement_", Supreme Power
and Divinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nature was the awful
Flame-image; that some effluence of Wuotan dwelt here in him! He was not
necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest he knew. A
great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is,--alternates between
the highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least
measure--Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he
may be; these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine
one another. With all men reverently admiring him; with his own wild
soul full of noble ardors and affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness
and glorious new light; a divine Universe bursting all into godlike
beauty round him, and no man to whom the like ever had befallen, what
could he think himself to be? "Wuotan?" All men answered, "Wuotan!"--

And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man
was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What an
enormous _camera-obscura_ magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in
the human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and
all that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in the
darkness, in the entire ignorance; without date or document, no book, no
Arundel-marble; only here and there some dumb monumental cairn. Why,
in thirty or forty years, were there no books, any great man would grow
_mythic_, the contemporaries who had seen him, being once all dead.
And in three hundred years, and in three thousand years--! To attempt
_theorizing_ on such matters would profit little: they are matters which
refuse to be _theoremed_ and diagramed; which Logic ought to know that
she _cannot_ speak of. Enough for us to discern, far in the uttermost
distance, some gleam as of a small real light shining in the centre of
that enormous camera-obscure image; to discern that the centre of it all
was not a madness and nothing, but a sanity and something.

This light, kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse Mind, dark but
living, waiting only for light; this is to me the centre of the whole