.
How such light will then shine out, and with wondrous thousand-fold
expansion spread itself, in forms and colors, depends not on _it_, so
much as on the National Mind recipient of it. The colors and forms
of your light will be those of the _cut-glass_ it has to shine
through.--Curious to think how, for every man, any the truest fact is
modelled by the nature of the man! I said, The earnest man, speaking to
his brother men, must always have stated what seemed to him a _fact_, a
real Appearance of Nature. But the way in which such Appearance or
fact shaped itself,--what sort of _fact_ it became for him,--was and
is modified by his own laws of thinking; deep, subtle, but universal,
ever-operating laws. The world of Nature, for every man, is the Fantasy
of Himself. This world is the multiplex "Image of his own Dream." Who
knows to what unnamable subtleties of spiritual law all these Pagan
Fables owe their shape! The number Twelve, divisiblest of all, which
could be halved, quartered, parted into three, into six, the most
remarkable number,--this was enough to determine the _Signs of the
Zodiac_, the number of Odin's _Sons_, and innumerable other Twelves. Any
vague rumor of number had a tendency to settle itself into Twelve. So
with regard to every other matter. And quite unconsciously too,--with no
notion of building up "Allegories "! But the fresh clear glance of those
First Ages would be prompt in discerning the secret relations of things,
and wholly open to obey these. Schiller finds in the _Cestus of
Venus_ an everlasting aesthetic truth as to the nature of all Beauty;
curious:--but he is careful not to insinuate that the old Greek Mythists
had any notion of lecturing about the "Philosophy of Criticism"!--On the
whole, we must leave those boundless regions. Cannot we conceive that
Odin was a reality? Error indeed, error enough: but sheer falsehood,
idle fables, allegory aforethought,--we will not believe that our
Fathers believed in these.

Odin's _Runes_ are a significant feature of him. Runes, and the miracles
of "magic" he worked by them, make a great feature in tradition. Runes
are the Scandinavian Alphabet; suppose Odin to have been the inventor
of Letters, as well as "magic," among that people! It is the greatest
invention man has ever made! this of marking down the unseen thought
that is in him by written characters. It is a kind of second speech,
almost as miraculous as the first. You remember the astonishme