sadness, as the rainbow on black tempest: only a right valiant heart is
capable of that. It is the grim humor of our own Ben Jonson, rare old Ben;
runs in the blood of us, I fancy; for one catches tones of it, under a
still other shape, out of the American Backwoods.

That is also a very striking conception that of the _Ragnarok_,
Consummation, or _Twilight of the Gods_. It is in the _Voluspa_ Song;
seemingly a very old, prophetic idea. The Gods and Jotuns, the divine
Powers and the chaotic brute ones, after long contest and partial victory
by the former, meet at last in universal world-embracing wrestle and duel;
World-serpent against Thor, strength against strength; mutually extinctive;
and ruin, "twilight" sinking into darkness, swallows the created Universe.
The old Universe with its Gods is sunk; but it is not final death: there
is to be a new Heaven and a new Earth; a higher supreme God, and Justice to
reign among men. Curious: this law of mutation, which also is a law
written in man's inmost thought, had been deciphered by these old earnest
Thinkers in their rude style; and how, though all dies, and even gods die,
yet all death is but a phoenix fire-death, and new-birth into the Greater
and the Better! It is the fundamental Law of Being for a creature made of
Time, living in this Place of Hope. All earnest men have seen into it; may
still see into it.

And now, connected with this, let us glance at the _last_ mythus of the
appearance of Thor; and end there. I fancy it to be the latest in date of
all these fables; a sorrowing protest against the advance of
Christianity,--set forth reproachfully by some Conservative Pagan. King
Olaf has been harshly blamed for his over-zeal in introducing Christianity;
surely I should have blamed him far more for an under-zeal in that! He
paid dear enough for it; he died by the revolt of his Pagan people, in
battle, in the year 1033, at Stickelstad, near that Drontheim, where the