the old brute powers of primitive Nature, as he ought to have perceived
by the size of the kids they wore. He had done better than he was aware
of, however. The three blows of his hammer had fallen on nothing less
than a huge mountain, instead of a giant, and left three deep glens
dinted into its surface; the drinking-horn, which he had undertaken to
empty, was the sea itself, or an outlet of the sea, which he had
perceptibly lowered; while the cat was in reality the Midgard Serpent,
which enringed the world in its coils, and the toothless she-wrestler
was Old Age! What wonder that Thor was brought to his knees? On finding
himself thus made game of, Thor grew wroth, but had to go his ways, as
the city of Utgard had vanished into thin air, with its cloud-capped
towers and enormous citizens. Thor afterwards undertook to catch the
Midgard Serpent, using a bull's head for bait. The World-Snake took the
delicious morsel greedily, and, finding itself hooked, writhed and
struggled so that Thor thrust his feet through the bottom of his boat,
in his endeavors to land his prey.

There is a certain grotesque humor in Thor's adventures, which is
missed in his mythologic counterpart of the South, Hercules. It is the
old rich "world-humor" of the North, genial and broad, which still
lives in the creations of the later Teutonic Muse. The dints which Thor
made on the mountain-skull of Skrymir were types and forerunners of the
later feats of the Teutonic race, performed on the rough, shaggy,
wilderness face of this Western hemisphere, channelling it with watery
highways, tunnelling and levelling its mountains, and strewing its
surface with cities. The old Eddas and Voluspas of the North are full
of significant lore for the sons of the Northmen, wherever their lot is
cast. There they will find, that, in colonizing and humanizing the face
of the world, in zoning it with railroads and telegraph-wires, in
bridging its oceans with clipper-ships, and steamboats, and in weaving,