Thunder was then not mere electricity, vitreous or resinous; it was the god Donner (Thunder), or Thor,—god, also, of the beneficent Summer-heat. The thunder was his wrath; the gathering of the black clouds is the drawing down of Thor’s angry brows; the fire-bolt bursting out of heaven is the all-rending hammer flung from the hand of Thor. He urges his loud chariot over the mountain tops—that is the peal; wrathful he blows in his red beard—that is the rustling storm-blast before the thunder begins. Balder, again, the White God, the beautiful, the just and benignant, (whom the early Christian missionaries found to resemble Christ,) is the sun—beautifulest of visible things: wondrous, too, and divine still, after all our astronomies and almanacs! But perhaps the notablest god we hear tell of is one of whom Grimm, the German etymologist, finds trace: the god Wünsch, or Wish. The god _Wish_, who could give us all that we _wished_! Is not this the sincerest and yet the rudest voice of the spirit of man? The _rudest_ ideal that man ever formed, which still shows itself in the latest forms of our spiritual culture. Higher considerations have to teach us that the god _Wish_ is not the true God. Of the other gods or Jötuns, I will mention, only for etymology’s sake, that Sea-tempest is the Jötun _Ægir_, a very dangerous Jötun; and now to this day, on our river Trent, as I learn, the Nottingham bargemen, when the river is in a certain flooded state (a kind of back-water or eddying swirl it has, very dangerous to them), call it _Eager_. They cry out, Have a care! there is the _Eager_ coming! Curious, that word surviving, like the peak of a submerged world! The _oldest_ Nottingham barge-men had believed in the god Ægir. Indeed, our English blood, too, in good part, is Danish, Norse,—or rather, at the bottom, Danish and Norse and Saxon have no distinction except a superficial one—as of Heathen and Christian, or the like. But all over our island we are mingled largely with Danes proper—from the incessant invasions there were; and this, of course, in a greater proportion along the east coast; and greatest of all, as I find, in the north country. From the Humber upward, all over Scotland, the speech of the common people is still in singular degree Icelandic; its Germanism has still a peculiar Norse tinge. They, too, are Normans, Northmen—if that be any great beauty!