then the next thing remarkable for that quality, a tree for instance, was
named the _green_ tree,--as we still say "the _steam_ coach," "four-horse
coach," or the like. All primary adjectives, according to Smith, were
formed in this way; were at first substantives and things. We cannot
annihilate a man for etymologies like that! Surely there was a First
Teacher and Captain; surely there must have been an Odin, palpable to the
sense at one time; no adjective, but a real Hero of flesh and blood! The
voice of all tradition, history or echo of history, agrees with all that
thought will teach one about it, to assure us of this.

How the man Odin came to be considered a _god_, the chief god?--that surely
is a question which nobody would wish to dogmatize upon. I have said, his
people knew no _limits_ to their admiration of him; they had as yet no
scale to measure admiration by. Fancy your own generous heart's-love of
some greatest man expanding till it _transcended_ all bounds, till it
filled and overflowed the whole field of your thought! Or what if this man
Odin,--since a great deep soul, with the afflatus and mysterious tide of
vision and impulse rushing on him he knows not whence, is ever an enigma, a
kind of terror and wonder to himself,--should have felt that perhaps _he_
was divine; that _he_ was some effluence of the "Wuotan," "_Movement_",
Supreme Power and Divinity, of whom to his rapt vision all Nature was the
awful Flame-image; that some effluence of Wuotan dwelt here in him! He was
not necessarily false; he was but mistaken, speaking the truest he knew. A
great soul, any sincere soul, knows not what he is,--alternates between the
highest height and the lowest depth; can, of all things, the least
measure--Himself! What others take him for, and what he guesses that he
may be; these two items strangely act on one another, help to determine one
another. With all men reverently admiring him; with his own wild soul full
of noble ardors and affections, of whirlwind chaotic darkness and glorious
new light; a divine Universe bursting all into godlike beauty round him,