But the imagination of these people had a still wider and loftier range. Influenced by the glories of nature which surrounded them, they sought for the origin and first impulses of created things and strove to make their conceptions co-extensive with the universe, while they peopled nature with supernatural agencies of all kinds. Yet there was a proud humility in the loftiest flights of their imaginations. They elaborated a mythology and cosmogony, but alone among religious beliefs that of the Norsemen recognised that there must be some greater and higher order of things to follow that which, in the youth of the world, sufficed partly to satisfy their own aspirations. Fimbultyn, “he who sent the heat,” the great Helper, the mighty God, would guide the new order and live for ever. The most beautiful myth in the northern mythology is that of Arctic day and night, of Balder and Hoder. It has been the theme of modern poets from Œhlenschlager to Matthew Arnold. The death of the Sun-God, the Deity of light and beneficence, through the treachery of Lok, but by the unknowing hand of his blind brother Hoder, the God of Darkness, is a myth the meaning of which is obvious. But the story of his death, of the mourning of all created things, and of the efforts to save the beloved one from Hela, the Goddess of Death, is deeply pathetic. The funeral of Balder attended by the whole pantheon, including giants and dwarfs, each deity with all his legendary attendants, and the launch of the flaming ship bearing the body into the silent sea, reaches the highest flight of poetic imagination. Then Hermod, the messenger of the Gods, is sent by the All-father, on Odin’s horse Sleipner, with an order for the death-goddess Hela in Nifelheim, her abode of ice and snow, to release Balder:-- “And he came down to ocean’s northern strand At the drear ice, beyond the giant’s home: Thence on he journeyed o’er the fields of ice Still north, until he met a stretching wall Barring his way.” The Arctic Circle! He puts Sleipner at it, the celestial steed clears it at a bound, and Hermod, the first Arctic explorer, enters Nifelheim. But the mission fails, for there was one thing that Odin could not do, and that was to undo what he himself had ruled. So Hela held her prey until the twilight of the Gods, when the old order passed away.