10 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



earthquake or hurricane, vast and fatal desert, or frowning mountain ; 

 but by its pleasing diversity it stimulated, without overwhelming, his 

 soul. That portion of the Aryans that, upon their migration from the 

 old Bactrian home, reached the shores of the -^gean, found there a land 

 that fostered still more these traits. Here nature was picturesque 

 and diversified, without the stupendous magnitudes that overawe the 

 soul. Above him, the sky was bluest of the blue. The marble hills 

 formed continual pictures. The streams rippled cheerily down their 

 songful beds. The wavelets chased each other playfully in the light 

 zephyrs. All the aspects of earth and sea and sky were bright and 

 gladsome, and conspired to stimulate the imagination of the Greek. 



Hellenic religion came thus, by right, to be a happy and luxuriant 

 faith, full of pretty fancies, putting man at ease with the divine, and 

 personifying the gods under the most familiar and graceful shapes : 



" Sunbeams upon distant hill, 

 Gliding apace with shadows in their tram, 

 Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed 

 Into fleet oreads, sporting visibly." 



The wind was fancied a divine harper, who makes music in the 

 tree-tops, and drives the flocks of the sun — the fleecy clouds — where 

 he wills. The murmuring spring was imaged as a gentle nymph ; and 

 within each fine tree was an imprisoned dryad. In short, the diversi- 

 fied and charming scenery supplied an unequaled wealth of religious 

 and mythic lore. And, as man, in this climate, exempt from the de- 

 bilitating heats of the tropics and the stunting of too severe cold, 

 reached the ideal of bodily perfection, the human form became, not 

 unnaturally, to the Greek, the noblest type under which he could 

 represent the divine. The gods were humanized — stronger and more 

 beautiful beings, to be sure, than ordinary men, but possessed of the 

 same forms, members, and passions. 



The course which the Norsemen took when they, in their turn, 

 went forth from the common Aryan home, was less propitious. It led 

 them to a land where the summer was short and the sun soon had to 

 wage a bitter and losing war for long months with frost and snow ; a 

 land where the fiords were heavily sealed with ice, and man had a 

 bitter task to keep the wolf of starvation and death from his door. 

 The sternness and gloom of the land were reflected in the Northman's 

 thought and faith. Woden, the stormful, Thor, the thunderer, and 

 Loki, the vengeful and cunning destroyer, become the chief figures 

 in his myths. The interest centers in the struggles of the Aesir, the 

 deities of light and beneficence, against the frost-giants and their allies 

 or servants — the midgard-serpent, the fenris-wolf, and the dreaded 

 Hel — ^varied personifications of darkness, cold, and death. 



Delighting himself, as the Norseman did, in the vigorous exercise 

 and the hearty feasting, to which the frosty air stimulated, his gods 



