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/83

 Scandinavians, and Germans. In order fully to comprehend the man, we must study the life of the child; and in order to comprehend ourselves as a people, we must study our own ancient history and literature and make ourselves thoroughly acquainted with the imaginative and prophetic childhood of the Teutonic race. We must give far more attention than we do, first, to English and Anglo-Saxon, and we must, as we have heard Dr. S. H. Carpenter, of the University of Wisconsin most truthfully remark, begin with the most modern English, and then follow it step by step, century by century, back to the most ancient Anglo-Saxon. A living language can be learned ten times as fast as a dead one, and we would apply Dr. Carpenter's principle still further. We would make one of the living Romanic languages (French, Italian, or Spanish,) a key to the Latin; and above all, we would make modern Greek a preparation for old classic Greek. It cannot be controverted that children learn to read and write a language much sooner and easier if they first learn to speak it, even though the book-speech may differ considerably from the dialect which the child learned from his mother; ample evidence of which fact may be found in the different counties of England and Scotland and throughout the European countries.

In the next place, that is, next after English and Anglo-Saxon, we must study German, Mæso-Gothic and the Scandinavian languages, and especially Icelandic, which is the only living key to the history of the middle ages, and to the Old Norse literature. It is the only language now in use in an almost unchanged form, through a knowledge of which we can read the litera-*