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eagle and the dragon, type of the hourly strife between good 
and evil, between life and death, between light and darkness. 
Under the branches of Yggdrasil sat the iEsir, the high gods, 
in solemn council; they were waited on by three maidens, the 
Norns, who stayed in their chamber under the ash-tree till they 
were called on to determine the fate of the children of men. 
Were everything left to them, all would go well, but their bene- 
ficent purposes are thwarted by three dread sisters, the Evil 
Norns. The life of mankind is a constant struggle between the 
Good and the Evil Norns, and over all the turmoil and sorrow 
the serene gods watch in silence, constantly intervening through 
occult agencies, clothing spirits in a thousand disguises, vivify- 
ing stones and plants and beasts, incessantly interested in the 
motley life of man. 
4. The notion of holiness, of the spiritual exaltation of a pure 
existence, seems to have occurred to the Scandinavians alone 
of pagan nations. It is not in Baldur, the beautiful and 
faultless God of the Morning, the type of invulnerable comeli- 
ness, that we find this thought carried out ; the best myths of 
Apollo present just as bright a figure; but in Heimdall, the 
White God, the immaculate deity, who was born before the 
beginning of the world, without father, without mother, trained 
by nine mystic maidens, and nourished on the vital strength 
of the earth and the cold pure foam of the sea. He, the 
watchman of the gods, sits at the earthward end of heaven, 
and the rainbow springs from his feet. He sees all things and 
hears all things, and lying awake at night, listens to the grass 
growing all over the world. In his ineffable purit 3 r he sits 
alone, without passion or emotion, waiting for the end of all 
things. Under the roots of Yggdrasil he has hidden his great 
horn, but one day he will set it to his lips and blow, and all the 
worlds will hear it, and the very dead will rise. 
5. There w r ere twelve iEsir, above all of whom Odin Allfather 
sat supreme. Of these eleven were beneficent, one only evil 
and rancorous. Loki, hated of gods and men, was an incarna- 
tion of evil, presenting in some respects a parallel to the position 
we find Satan allowed to occupy in heaven in the book of Job. 
It was permitted to Loki to pervert the ways of men, to tra- 
duce them, and even to cause the counsels of the good gods 
to fail in their execution. After consummating his crimes by 
instigating the death of Baldur, the iEsir attempted to destroy 
him, as is related in the wild legends of the prose Edda, but 
in vain. His infinite cunning suggested to him so many meta- 
morphoses that the gods themselves were baffled in their 
