[225] One must not believe that the mute _e_ with which many English words terminate represents the French feminine final, expressed by the same vowel. This mute _e_ is in reality mute in English; ordinarily it is only used to give a more open sound to the vowel which precedes it, as in _tale_, _scene_, _bone_, _pure_, _fire_. Besides it is never taken into account, either in the measure or in the prosody of the lines. Thus these two lines of Dryden rhyme exactly: “Now scarce the Trojan fleet with sails and oars Had left behind the fair Sicilian shores.…” _Æneid_, b. i., v. 50. It is the same in these of Addison: “Tune ev’ry string and ev’ry tongue, Be thou the Muse and subject of our song.…” _St. Cecilia’s Day_, i., 10. or these from Goldsmith: “How often have I loiter’d o’er thy green, Where humble happiness endeared each scene.” _The Deserted Village_, i., 7. [226] There remains to us of this poetry the very precious fragments contained in the _Edda_ and in _Voluspa_. The _Edda_, whose name signifies great-grandmother, is a collection, fairly ample, of Scandinavian traditions. _Voluspa_ is a sort of Sibylline book, or cosmogonic oracle, as its name indicates. I am convinced that if the poets of the north, the Danes, Swedes, and Germans, had oftener drawn their subjects from these indigenous sources, they would have succeeded better than by going to Greece to seek them upon the summits of Parnassus. The mythology of Odin, descended from the Rhipæan mountains, suits them better than that of the Greeks, whose tongue furthermore is not conformable here. When one makes the moon and the wife (_der Mond_, _das Weib_) of masculine and neuter gender; when one makes the sun, the air, time, love (_die Sonne_, _die Luft_, _die Zeit_, _die Liebe_) of feminine gender, one ought wisely to renounce the allegories of Parnassus. It was on account of the sex given to the sun and the moon that the schism arose, of which I have spoken, in explaining the origin of the temple of Delphi. The Scandinavian allegories, however, that I consider a _débris_ of Thracian allegories, furnishing subjects of a very different character from those of the Greeks and Latins, might have varied the poetry of Europe and prevented the Arabesque fiction from holding there so much ascendancy. The Scandinavian verses, being without rhyme, hold moreover, to eumolpœia. The following is a strophe from _Voluspa_: “Avant que le temps fût, Ymir avait été; Ni la mer, ni nes vents n’existaient pas encore; Il n’était de terre, il n’était point de ciel: Tout n’était qu’un abîme immense, sans verdure.”