duing
them, at least straitening and damaging them. There is a great broad
humor in some of these things.

Thor, as we saw above, goes to Jotun-land, to seek Hymir's Caldron, that
the Gods may brew beer. Hymir the huge Giant enters, his gray beard
all full of hoar-frost; splits pillars with the very glance of his eye;
Thor, after much rough tumult, snatches the Pot, claps it on his head;
the "handles of it reach down to his heels." The Norse Skald has a kind
of loving sport with Thor. This is the Hymir whose cattle, the
critics have discovered, are Icebergs. Huge untutored Brobdignag
genius,--needing only to be tamed down; into Shakspeares, Dantes,
Goethes! It is all gone now, that old Norse work,--Thor the Thunder-god
changed into Jack the Giant-killer: but the mind that made it is here
yet. How strangely things grow, and die, and do not die! There are twigs
of that great world-tree of Norse Belief still curiously traceable. This
poor Jack of the Nursery, with his miraculous shoes of swiftness, coat
of darkness, sword of sharpness, he is one. _Hynde Etin_, and still more
decisively _Red Etin of Ireland_, _in_ the Scottish Ballads, these
are both derived from Norseland; _Etin_ is evidently a _Jotun_. Nay,
Shakspeare's _Hamlet_ is a twig too of this same world-tree; there seems
no doubt of that. Hamlet, _Amleth_ I find, is really a mythic personage;
and his Tragedy, of the poisoned Father, poisoned asleep by drops in his
ear, and the rest, is a Norse mythus! Old Saxo, as his wont was, made it
a Danish history; Shakspeare, out of Saxo, made it what we see. That
is a twig of the world-tree that has _grown_, I think;--by nature or
accident that one has grown!

In fact, these old Norse songs have a _truth_ in them, an inward
perennial truth and greatness,--as, indeed, all must have that can very
long preserve itself by tradition alone. It is a greatness not of mere
body and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is a sublime
uncomplaining melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A great free
glance into the very deeps of thought. They seem to have seen, these
brave old Northmen, what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, That
this world is after all but a show,--a phenomenon or appearance, no real
thing. All deep souls see into that,--the Hindoo Mythologist, the German
Philosopher,--the Shakspeare, the earnest Thinker, wherever he may be:

"We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!"

One of Thor's e