into life? We still honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth:
but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous
unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!--Thought once awakened does
not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man
after man, generation after generation,--till its full stature is reached,
and _such_ System of Thought can grow no farther; but must give place to
another.

For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we
fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero,
of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds,
became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many
other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless gratitude, would the
rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of
this Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny there? By him
they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter.
Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life
alive!--We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or
whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men.
His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in
all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there.
In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his
word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world,
the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker
in the world!--

One other thing we must not forget; it will explain, a little, the
confusion of these Norse Eddas. They are not one coherent System of
Thought; but properly the _summation_ of several successive systems. All
this of the old Norse Belief which is flung out for us, in one level of