precisely the same manner as the imagination of the poet of the
"Lay of the Nibelung" magnified the stature and strength of
Siegfried. His shoulders, says the legend, were sixty ells broad;
when the Spirit of God came on him he could step from Zorah to
Eshtaol although he was lame in both feet; the hairs of his head
arose and clashed against one another so that they could be heard
for a like distance; he was so strong that he could uplift two
mountains and rub them together like two clods of earth, Herakles
tore asunder the mountain which, divided, now forms the Straits of
Gibraltar and Gates of Hercules.

The parallel which is frequently drawn between Samson and Herakles
cannot be pursued far with advantage to the Hebrew hero. Samson
rent a young lion on the road to Timnath, whither he was going to
take his Philistine wife; Herakles, while still a youthful
herdsman, slew the Thespian lion and afterward strangled the Nemean
lion with his hands. Samson carried off the gates of Gaza and bore
them to the top of a hill before Hebron; Herakles upheld the
heavens while Atlas went to fetch the golden apples of Hesperides.
Moreover, the feats of Herakles show a higher intellectual quality
than those of Samson, all of which, save one, were predominantly
physical. The exception was the trick of tying 300 foxes by their
tails, two by two, with firebrands between and turning them loose
to burn the corn of the Philistines. An ingenious way to spread a
conflagration, probably, but primitive, decidedly primitive.
Herakles was a scientific engineer of the modern school; he yoked
the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to his service by turning their
waters through the Augean stables and cleansing them of the
deposits of 3000 oxen for thirty years. Herakles had excellent
intellectual training; Rhadamanthus taught him wisdom and virtue,