sits on his golden throne, on Olympos, on the top of the mountain, in the cloud. But that is not lofty enough for the spirit of the Norsemen. Odin’s Valhal is in heaven; nay, Odin himself is not the highest god; Muspelheim is situated above Asaheim, and in Muspelheim is Gimle, where reigns a god, who is mightier than Odin, the god whom Hyndla ventures not to name. In _Heroes and Hero Worship_, Thomas Carlyle makes the following striking comparison between Norse and Greek mythology: To me, he says, there is in the Norse system something very genuine, very great and manlike. A broad simplicity, rusticity, so very different from the light gracefulness of the old Greek paganism, distinguishes this Norse system. It is _thought_, the genuine thought of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to the things about them, a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of things—the first characteristic of all good thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half sport, as in the Greek paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great rude sincerity, discloses itself here. Thus Carlyle. As the visible workings of nature are in the great and main features the same everywhere; in all climes we find the vaulted sky with its sun, moon, myriad stars and flitting clouds; the sea with its surging billows; the land with its manifold species of plants and animals, its elevations and depressions; we find cold, heat, rain, winds, etc., although all these may vary widely in color, brilliancy, depth, height, degree, and other qualities; and as the minds and hearts of men cherish hope, fear, anxiety, passion, etc., although they may be influenced and actuated by them in various ways and to various extents; and as mythology is the impersonation of nature’s forces and phenomena as contemplated by the human mind and _heart_, so all mythologies, no matter in what clime they originated and were fostered, must of necessity have their stock of materials, their ground-work or foundation and frame in common, while they may differ widely from each other in respect to peculiar characteristics, both in the ethical elaboration of the myth and in the architectural effect of the _tout ensemble_. Thus we have a tradition about a deluge, for instance, in nearly every country on the globe, but no two nations tell it alike. In Genesis we read of Noah and his ark, and how the waters increased greatly upon the earth, destroying all flesh that moved upon the earth excepting those who were with him in the ark. In Greece, Deukalion and his wife Pyrrha become the founders of a new race of men. According to the Greek story, a great flood had swept away the whole human race, except one pair, Deukalion and Pyrrha, who, as the flood abated, landed on Mt. Parnassos, and thence descending, picked up stones and cast them round about, as Zeus had commanded. From these stones sprung a new race—men from those cast by Deukalion, and women from those cast by his wife.