and no man to whom the like ever had befallen, what could he think himself
to be? "Wuotan?" All men answered, "Wuotan!"--

And then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man was
great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What an enormous
_camera-obscura_ magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human
Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and all that lies in
the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in the darkness, in the
entire ignorance; without date or document, no book, no Arundel-marble;
only here and there some dumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty
years, were there no books, any great man would grow _mythic_, the
contemporaries who had seen him, being once all dead. And in three hundred
years, and in three thousand years--! To attempt _theorizing_ on such
matters would profit little: they are matters which refuse to be
_theoremed_ and diagramed; which Logic ought to know that she _cannot_
speak of. Enough for us to discern, far in the uttermost distance, some
gleam as of a small real light shining in the centre of that enormous
camera-obscure image; to discern that the centre of it all was not a
madness and nothing, but a sanity and something.

This light, kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse Mind, dark but
living, waiting only for light; this is to me the centre of the whole. How
such light will then shine out, and with wondrous thousand-fold expansion
spread itself, in forms and colors, depends not on _it_, so much as on the
National Mind recipient of it. The colors and forms of your light will be
those of the _cut-glass_ it has to shine through.--Curious to think how,
for every man, any the truest fact is modelled by the nature of the man! I
said, The earnest man, speaking to his brother men, must always have stated
what seemed to him a _fact_, a real Appearance of Nature. But the way in
which such Appearance or fact shaped itself,--what sort of _fact_ it became