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On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle
page 30 of 251 (11%)
and he had to shine there, and make his obscure element a little
lighter,--as is still the task of us all.

We will fancy him to be the Type Norseman; the finest Teuton whom that race
had yet produced. The rude Norse heart burst up into _boundless_
admiration round him; into adoration. He is as a root of so many great
things; the fruit of him is found growing from deep thousands of years,
over the whole field of Teutonic Life. Our own Wednesday, as I said, is it
not still Odin's Day? Wednesbury, Wansborough, Wanstead, Wandsworth: Odin
grew into England too, these are still leaves from that root! He was the
Chief God to all the Teutonic Peoples; their Pattern Norseman;--in such way
did _they_ admire their Pattern Norseman; that was the fortune he had in
the world.

Thus if the man Odin himself have vanished utterly, there is this huge
Shadow of him which still projects itself over the whole History of his
People. For this Odin once admitted to be God, we can understand well that
the whole Scandinavian Scheme of Nature, or dim No-scheme, whatever it
might before have been, would now begin to develop itself altogether
differently, and grow thenceforth in a new manner. What this Odin saw
into, and taught with his runes and his rhymes, the whole Teutonic People
laid to heart and carried forward. His way of thought became their way of
thought:--such, under new conditions, is the history of every great thinker
still. In gigantic confused lineaments, like some enormous camera-obscure
shadow thrown upwards from the dead deeps of the Past, and covering the
whole Northern Heaven, is not that Scandinavian Mythology in some sort the
Portraiture of this man Odin? The gigantic image of _his_ natural face,
legible or not legible there, expanded and confused in that manner! Ah,
Thought, I say, is always Thought. No great man lives in vain. The
History of the world is but the Biography of great men.
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