Thunder was not then mere Electricity, vitreous or resinous; it was the God Donner (Thunder) or Thor,--God also of 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, beautifullest 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 _Wunsch_, or Wish. The God _Wish_; who could give us all that we _wished_! Is not this the sincerest and yet 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 Jotuns I will mention only for etymology's sake, that Sea-tempest is the Jotun _Aegir_, a very dangerous Jotun;--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 backwater, 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 bargemen had believed in the God Aegir. Indeed our English blood too in good part is Danish, Norse; or rather, at 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 upwards, all over Scotland, the Speech of the common people is still in a singular degree Icelandic; its Germanism has still a peculiar Norse tinge. They too are "Normans," Northmen,--if that be any great beauty--!