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/84

 *ture of the middle ages. We must by no means forget that we have Teutonic antiquities to which we stand in an entirely different and far closer relation than we do to Greece or Rome. And the Norsemen have an old literature, which the scholar must of necessity be familiar with in order to comprehend the history of the middle ages.

When we have thus done justice to our own Teutonic race we may turn our attention to the ancient peoples around the Mediterranean Sea, the most important of which in literary and historical respects are the Hebrews, Greeks and Romans. The antiquities of these peoples will always form important departments in our colleges and universities, and it is our duty to study them; but they should not, as they still to a great extent do, constitute the all-absorbing subject of our attention, the summa summarum, the foundation and superstructure of our education and culture.

It has been argued by some that the Latin is more terse than English; but did the reader ever reflect that it takes about sixty syllables in Latin to express all that we can say in English with forty syllables? The large number of inflectional endings have also been lauded as a point of superior excellence in the Latin; but as a language grows and makes progress, it gradually emancipates itself from the thraldom of inflection and contents itself with the abstract, spiritual chain that links the words together into sentences; and did the reader ever run across this significant truth, expressed by George P. Marsh, who says that in Latin you have to be able to analyse and parse a sentence before you can comprehend it, while in English you must comprehend the sentence before you can analyse or parse? Forward has been and will