Page:Norse mythology or, the religion of our forefathers, containing all the myths of the Eddas, systematized and interpreted with an introduction, vocabulary and index.djvu/127

 by German tradition. The poems of the Elder Edda show us what the myths of Greece would have been without a Homer. They remain huge, wild and fragmentary; full of strange gaps rent into their very vitals by the strokes of rude centuries; yet like the ruin of the Colosseum or the temples of Pæstum, standing aloft amid the daylight of the present time, magnificent testimonials of the stupendous genius of the race which reared them. There is nothing besides the Bible, which sits in a divine tranquillity of unapproachable nobility like a king of kings amongst all other books, and the poem of Homer itself, which can compare in all the elements of greatness with the Edda. There is a loftiness of stature, and a firmness of muscle about it which no poets of the same race have ever since reached. The only production since, that can be compared with the Elder Edda in profoundness of thought, is that of Shakespeare, the Hercules or Thor in English literature, that heroic mind of divine lineage which passed through the hell-gates of the Roman school-system unscathed. The obscurity which still hangs over some parts of the Elder Edda, like the deep shadows crouching amid the ruins of the past, is the result of neglect, and will in due time be removed; but amid this stand forth the boldest masses of intellectual masonry. We are astonished at the wisdom which is shaped into maxims, and at the tempestuous strength of passions to which all modern emotions seem puny and constrained. Amid the bright sun-light of a far-off time, surrounded by the densest shadows of forgotten ages, we come at once into the midst of gods and heroes, goddesses and fair women, giants and dwarfs, moving about in a world of wonderful construction, unlike any other world or creation which God has