her, she endeavored to render him fit to colonize and sway the world.
Summer paid him but a brief visit. His companions were the frost, the
fluttering snowflake, the stinging hail. For music, instead of the
soft notes of a shepherd's pipe under blue Italian or Grecian skies,
he listened to the north wind whistling among the bare branches, or to
the roar of an angry northern sea upon the bleak coast.

The feeble could not withstand the rigor of such a climate, in the
absence of the comforts of civilization. Only the strongest in each
generation survived; and these transmitted to their children
increasing vigor. Warfare was incessant not only with nature but also
with the surrounding tribes. Nature kept the Teuton in such a school
until he seemed fit to colonize the world and to produce a literature
that would appeal to humanity in every age.

The Early Teutonic Religion.--In the early days on the continent,
before the Teuton had learned of Christianity, his religious beliefs
received their most pronounced coloring from the rigors of his
northern climate, from the Frost Giants, the personified forces of
evil, with whom he battled. The kindly, life-bringing spring and
summer, which seemed to him earth's redeeming divinity, were soon
slain by the arrows that came from the winter's quivers. Not even
Thor, the wielder of the thunderbolt, nor Woden, the All-Father,
delayed the inevitable hour when the dusk of winter came, when the
voice of Baldur could no longer be heard awaking earth to a new life.
The approach of the "twilight of the gods," the _Götterdämmerung_, was
a stern reality to the Teuton.

[Illustration: WODEN.]