VIII.] WALHALLA. 109 



tween the reign of cold, darkness, and desolation, and the 

 still blanker ruin of a sin-perverted soul ? But in that iron 

 clime, amid such awful associations, the conflict going on 

 was too terrible — the contending powers too visibly in pre- 

 sence of each other, for the practical, conscientious Norse 

 mind to be content with the puny godships of a Roman 

 Olympus. Nectar, Sensuality, and Inextinguishable Laughter 

 were elements of felicity too mean for the nobler atmosphere 

 of their Walhalla ; and to those active temperaments and 

 healthy minds, — invigorated and solemnized by the massive 

 mould of the scenery around them, — Strength, Courage, 

 Endurance, and above all Self-sacrifice — naturally seemed 

 more essential attributes of divinity than mere elegance and 

 beauty. And we must remember that whilst the vigorous 

 imagination of the north was delighting itself in creating a 

 stately dreamland, where it strove to blend, in a grand world- 

 picture — always harmonious, though not always consistent 

 — the influences which sustain both the physical and moral 

 system of its universe, an undercurrent of sober Gothic com- 

 mon sense induced it — as a kind of protest against the too 

 material interpretation of the symbolism it had employed — 

 to wind up its religious scheme by sweeping into the chaos 

 of oblivion all the glorious fabric it had evoked, and pro- 

 claiming — in the place of the transient gods and perishable 

 heaven of its Asgaard — that One undivided Deity, at whose 

 approach the pillars of Walhalla were to fall, and Odin and 

 his peers to perish, with all the subtle machinery of their 

 existence ; while man — himself immortal — was summoned 

 to receive at the hands of the Eternal All-Father the sentence 

 that waited upon his deeds. It is true this purer system 

 belonged only to the early ages. As in the case of every 

 false religion, the symbolism of the Scandinavian mythology 

 lost with each succeeding generation something of its tran- 

 sparency, and at last degenerated into a gross superstition. 

 But traces still remained, even down to the times of Christian 

 ascendency, of the deep, philosophical spirit in which it had 

 been originally conceived ; and through its homely imagery 



