nor the natural philosophy of our ancestors; but it is the germ and nucleus of them all. It is history, for it treats of events; but it is not history in the ordinary acceptance of that word, for the persons figuring therein have never existed. It is natural philosophy, for it investigates the origin of nature; but it is not natural philosophy according to modern ideas, for it personifies and deifies nature. It is metaphysics, for it studies the science and the laws of being; but it is not metaphysics in our sense of the word, for it rapidly overleaps all categories. It is poetry in its very essence; but its pictures are streams that flow together. Thus the Norse mythology is history, but limited to neither time nor place; poetry, but independent of arses or theses; philosophy, but without abstractions or syllogisms.
We close this chapter with the following extract from Thomas Carlyle's essays on Heroes and Hero-worship; an extract that undoubtedly will be read with interest and pleasure:
In that strange island—Iceland—burst up, the geologists
say, by fire, from the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness
and lava; swallowed, many months of the year, in black
tempests, yet with a wild, gleaming beauty in summer-time;
towering up there, stern and grim, in the North Ocean; with
its snow-jökuls, roaring geysers, sulphur pools and horrid volcanic
chasms, like the waste, chaotic battle-field of frost and fire—where
of all places we least looked for literature or written
memorials; the record of these things was written down. On
the seaboard of this wild land is a rim of grassy country, where
cattle can subsist, and men, by means of them and of what the
sea yields; and it seems they were poetic men, these—men who
had deep thoughts in them, and uttered musically their thoughts.
Much would be lost had Iceland not been burst up from the
sea—not been discovered by the Northmen! The old Norse
poets were many of them natives of Iceland.
Sæmund, one of the early Christian priests there, who perhaps had a lingering fondness for paganism, collected certain of
