Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/73

 Rh but besides this likeness, which they owe to father or mother, as the case may be, they have each their peculiarities of form and eye and face, and, still more, their differences of intellect and mind. This may be dark, that fair; this may have grey eyes, that black; this may be open and graceful, that reserved and close; this you may love, that you can take no interest in. One may be bashful, another winning, a third worth knowing and yet hard to know. They are so like, and so unlike. At first it may be, as an old English writer beautifully expresses it, "their father hath writ them as his own little story," but as they grow up they throw off the copy, educate themselves for good or ill, and finally assume new forms o feeling and feature under an original development of their own.

Or shall we take another likeness, and say they are national dreams; that they are like the sleeping thoughts of many men upon one and the same thing. Suppose a hundred men to have been eye-witnesses of some event on the same day, and then to have slept and dreamt of it; we should have as many distinct representations of that event, all turning upon it and bound up with it in some way, but each preserving the personality of the sleeper, and working up the common stuff in a higher or lower degree, just as the fancy and the intellect of the sleeper was at a higher or lower level of perfection. There is, indeed, greater truth in this likeness than may at first sight appear. In the popular tale, properly so called, the national mind dreams all its history over again; in its half-conscious state it takes this trait and that trait, this feature and that feature, of times and ages long past. It