I am going to attempt a short lecture upon it, because it is very closely related to the subject of Northern character, and will help us, perhaps better than almost anything else, to understand how the ancestors of the English felt and thought before they became Christians.

Nor is this all.

I venture to say that the character of the modern English people still retains much more of the quality indicated by the "Havamal" than of the quality implied by Christianity.

The old Northern gods are not dead; they rule a very great part of the world to-day.
The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.

And this sort of literature is certainly among the oldest.