Neither Olympus nor Erebus disdained the pleasures of
sense.
Shakspeare, in his "Midsummer-Night's Dream," has mingled the
mythologies of Hellas and Scandinavia, of the North and the South,
making of them a sort of mythic _olla podrida_. He represents the tiny
elves and fays of the Gothic fairyland, span-long creatures of dew and
moonshine, the lieges of King Oberon, and of Titania, his queen, as
making an irruption from their haunted hillocks, woods, meres, meadows,
and fountains, in the North, into the olive-groves of Ilissus, and
dancing their ringlets in the ray of the Grecian Selene, the chaste,
cold huntress, and running by the triple Hecate's team, following the
shadow of Night round the earth. Strangely must have sounded the horns
of the Northern Elfland, "faintly blowing" in the woods of Hellas, as
Oberon and his grotesque court glanced along, "with bit and bridle
ringing," to bless the nuptials of Theseus with the bouncing Amazon.
Strangely must have looked the elfin footprints in the Attic green.
Across this Shakspearean plank, laid between Olympus and Asgard, or
more strictly Alfheim, we gladly pass from the sunny realm of Zeus into
that of his Northern counterpart, Odin, who ought to be dearer and more
familiar to his descendants than the Grecian Jove, though he is not.
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