Page:Sartor resartus; and, On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history.djvu/300

 used in Scotland to signify hoar-frost. Rime was not then as now a dead chemical thing, but a living Jötun or Devil; the monstrous Jötun Rime drove home his Horses at night, sat 'combing their manes,'—which Horses were Hail-Clouds, or fleet Frost-Winds. His Cows—No, not his, but a kinsman's, the Giant Hymir's Cows are Icebergs: this Hymir 'looks at the rocks' with his devil-eye, and they split in the glance of it.

Thunder was not then mere Electricity, vitreous or resinous; it was the God Donner (Thunder) or Thor,—God also of beneficent Summer-heat. The thunder was his wrath; the gathering of the black clouds is the drawing down of Thor's angry brows; the fire-bolt bursting out of Heaven is the all-rending Hammer flung from the hand of Thor: he urges his loud chariot over the mountain-tops,—that is the peal: wrathful he 'blows in his red beard,'—that is the rustling storm-blast before the thunder begin. Balder again, the White God, the beautiful, the just and benignant (whom the early Christian Missionaries found to resemble Christ), is the Sun—beautifullest of visible things; wondrous too, and divine still, after all our Astronomies and Almanacs! But perhaps the notablest god we hear tell-of is one of whom Grimm the German Etymologist finds trace: the God Wünsch, or Wish. The God Wish; who could give us all that we wished! Is not this the sincerest yet rudest voice of the spirit of man? The rudest ideal that man ever formed; which still shows itself in the latest forms of our spiritual culture. Higher considerations have to teach us that the God Wish is not the true God.

Of the other Gods or Jötuns I will mention only for etymology's sake, that Sea-tempest is the Jötun Aegir, a very dangerous Jötun;—and now to this day, on our river Trent, as I learn, the Nottingham bargemen, when the River is in a certain flooded state (a kind of backwater, or eddying swirl it has, very dangerous to them), call it Eager; they cry out, 'Have a care, there is the Eager coming!' Curious; that word surviving, like the peak of a submerged world! The oldest Nottingham bargemen