“the German’s inward sight,
  And slow-sure Britain’s secular might,”

and it may be added, the Anglo-American’s unsurpassed practical energy, skill, and invincible love of freedom.  From the fountains of the ash-tree Yggdrasil flowed these things.  Some of the greatest of modern Teutonic writers have gone back to these fountains, flowing in these wild mythic wastes of the Past, and have drunk inspiration thence.  Percy, Scott, and Carlyle, by so doing, have infused new sap from the old life-tree of their race into our modern English literature, which had grown effete and stale from having had its veins injected with too much cold, thin, watery Gallic fluid.  Yes, Walter Scott heard the innumerous leafy sigh of Yggdrasil’s branches, and modulated his harp thereby.  Carlyle, too, has bathed in the three mystic fountains which flow fast by its roots.  In an especial manner has the German branch of the Teuton kindred turned back to those old musical well-springs bubbling up in the dim North, and they have been strengthened and inspired by the pilgrimage.  “Under the root, which stretches out towards the Joetuns, there is Mimir’s Well, in which Wisdom and Wit lie hidden.”  Longfellow, too, has drunk of Mimir’s Well, and hence the rare charm and witchery of his “Evangeline,” “Hiawatha,” and “Golden Legend.”  This well in the North is better than Castalian fount for the children of the North.

How much more genial and lovable is Balder, the Northern Sun-god, than his Grecian counterpart, the lord of the unerring bow, the Southern genius of light, and poesy, and music!  Balder dwelt in his palace of Breidablick, or Broadview; and in the magical spring-time of the North, when the fair maiden Iduna breathed into the blue air her genial breath, he set imprisoned Nature free, and filled the sky with silvery haze, and called home the stork and crane, summoning forth the tender buds, and clothing the bare branches with delicate green.  “Balder is the mildest, the wisest, and the most eloquent of all the AEsir,” says the “Edda.”  A voice of wail went through the palaces of Asgard when Balder was slain by the mistletoe dart.  Hermod rode down to the kingdom of Hela, or Death, to ransom the lost one.  Meantime his body was set adrift on a floating funeral pyre.  Hermod would have succeeded in his mission, had not Lok, the Spirit of Evil, interposed to thwart him.  For this, Lok was bound in prison, with cords made of the twisted intestines of one of his own sons; and he will remain imprisoned until the Twilight of the Gods, the consummation of all things.

On the shoulders of Odin, the supreme Scandinavian deity, sat two ravens, whispering in his ears.  These two ravens are called Hugin and Munin, or Thought and Memory.  These “stately ravens of the saintly days of yore” flew, each day, all over the world, gathering “facts and figures,” doubtless for their August master.  It is a beautiful fable, and reminds one of Milton’s “thoughts which wander through eternity.”  The dove of the Ark, and the bird which perched on the shoulder of the old Plutarchan hero Sertorius, are recalled by this Scandinavian legend:—­