Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel

114 THE LEGENDS.

and which will constrain all its posterity to the end of time ; that its will is nothing more than an expression of age, development, sunlight, food, and “the skyey influences.” If it were otherwise it would be in the power of a generation to arrest the life of a race.

All great thoughts are inspirations of God. They are part of the mechanism by which he advances the race ; they are new varieties created out of old genera.

There come bursts of creative force in history, when great thoughts are born, and then again Brahma, as the Hindoos say, goes to sleep for ages.

But, when the fever of creation comes, the poet, the inventor, or the philosopher can no more arrest the development of his own thoughts than the female bird, by her will-power, can stop the growth of the ova within her, or arrest the fever in the blood which forces her to incubation. The man who wrote the Shakespeare plays recognized this involuntary operation of even his own transcendent intellect, when he said :

** Our poesy is a gum which oozes From whence ’tis nourished.”

It came as the Arabian tree distilled its “medicinal gum”; it was the mere expression of an internal force, as much beyond his control as the production of the gum was beyond the control of the tree.

But in primitive races mind repeats mind for thousands of years. If a tale is told at a million hearth-fires, the probabilities are small, indeed, that any innovation at one hearth-fire, however ingenious, will work its way into ‘and modify the narration at all the rest. There is no printing-press to make the thoughts of one man the thoughts of thousands. While the innovator is modify-