Shakspeare, in his “Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” has mingled the mythologies of Hellas and Scandinavia, of the North and the South, making of them a sort of mythic olla podrida.  He represents the tiny elves and fays of the Gothic fairyland, span-long creatures of dew and moonshine, the lieges of King Oberon, and of Titania, his queen, as making an irruption from their haunted hillocks, woods, meres, meadows, and fountains, in the North, into the olive-groves of Ilissus, and dancing their ringlets in the ray of the Grecian Selene, the chaste, cold huntress, and running by the triple Hecate’s team, following the shadow of Night round the earth.  Strangely must have sounded the horns of the Northern Elfland, “faintly blowing” in the woods of Hellas, as Oberon and his grotesque court glanced along, “with bit and bridle ringing,” to bless the nuptials of Theseus with the bouncing Amazon.  Strangely must have looked the elfin footprints in the Attic green.  Across this Shakspearean plank, laid between Olympus and Asgard, or more strictly Alfheim, we gladly pass from the sunny realm of Zeus into that of his Northern counterpart, Odin, who ought to be dearer and more familiar to his descendants than the Grecian Jove, though he is not.  The forms which throng Asgard may not be so sculpturesquely beautiful, so definite, and fit to be copied in marble and bronze as those of Olympus.  There may be more vagueness of outline in the Scandinavian abode of the gods, as of far-off blue skyey shapes, but it is more cheerful and homelike.  Pleasantly wave the evergreen boughs of the Life-Tree, Yggdrasil, the mythic ash-tree of the old North, whose leaves are green with an unwithering bloom that shall defy even the fires of the final conflagration.  Iduna, or Spring, sits in those boughs with her apples of rejuvenescence, restoring the wasted strength of the gods.  In the shade of its topmost branches stands Asgard, the abode of the Asen, who are called the Rafters of the World,—­to wit, Odin, Thor, Freir, and the other higher powers, male and female, of the old Teutonic religion.  In Asgard is Valhalla, the hall of elect heroes.  The roots of this mundane ash reach as far downwards as its branches do upwards.  Its roots, trunk, and branches together thrid the universe, shooting Hela, the kingdom of death, Midgard, the abode of men, and Asgard, the dwelling of the gods, like so many concentric rings.

This ash was a psychological and ontological plant.  All the lore of Plato and Kant and Fichte and Cousin was audible in the sigh of its branches.  Three Norns, Urt, Urgand, and Skuld, dwelt beneath it, so that it comprehended time past, present, and future.  The gods held their councils beneath it.  By one of its stems murmured the Fountain of Mimir, in Niflheim or Mistland, from whose urn welled up the ocean and the rivers of the earth.  Odin had his outlook in its top, where kept watch and ward the All-seeing Eye.  In its boughs frisked and gambolled a squirrel