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It was only this afternoon that so slight a circumstance as a ray of light flashing in my eye provided me an agreeable and unexpected truantry. It sent me climbing the mountains of the North and in no less company than that of Brunhilda and a troop of Valkyrs. It is likely enough that none of you have heard of Long Street. As far as I am aware it is not known to general fame.
The gravestone of the Saxon father-chief was lit up, as with the coil of the lightning; and the Morthwyrtha looked from the mound, and saw in her visions of awe the Valkyrs in the train of the fiery star. On the roof of his palace stood Harold the King, and with folded arms he looked on the Rider of Night.
It was thus that I was sent aloft upon the mountains of the North, into the glare of lightning, with the cry of Valkyrs above the storm.... But presently there was a voice from the street. "It's the last case to-night, Sam, you lunk-head. It's quitting time." The light fades on Long Street. The drays have gone home.
The war-trumpet sounded, and the gods rode over the rainbow, clad in steel, to fight the last battle. The winged Valkyrs rode before them, and the dead warriors closed the train. The whole firmament was ablaze with northern lights, and yet the darkness seemed to predominate. It was a terrible hour.
"Then it is by this that I am to be stopped!" I gasped. "By this! It is not possible after all, it seems; and I'm to be dragged back after all! By Heaven, we'll see!" And so I gave the cry again the cry of the Valkyrs that is madness to me! Do you not hear it? and I was away again and free! What does a man want for his soul, if it be not just to strive, and to be resisted, and still to strive?
There was war in heaven while those armies made it on earth. Out of the lightning flare came the Valkyrs, daughters of Odin, choosers of the slain. They rode grey horses; they wore helms and coats of mail; their spear-heads gleamed like fire. Helgi sat by the Eagle Rock and cried out to them to stay.
But luckily, as he paused for breath, his look fell on those limpid blue eyes of my mother, and that honest open brow of hers, which had certainly nothing in common with Sphinxes, Fates, Furies, or Valkyrs; and whether his heart smote him, or his reason made him own that he had fallen into a very disingenuous and unsound train of assertion, I know not, but his front relaxed, and with a smile he resumed: "Ellinor was the last person in the world to deceive any one willingly.
He never conceived a single new melody, but substituted instead, sadly mauled and pinched thematic fragments of Liszt, Berlioz, and Beethoven, combined with exaggerated fairy-tales, clothed in showy tinsel and theatrical gauds, the illusion being aided by panoramic scenery; scenery that acted in company with toads, dragons, horses, snakes, crazy valkyrs, mermaids, half-mad humans, gods, demons, dwarfs, and giants.
Hilda's husband had fallen in one of the actions in the Northern seas, between Canute and St. The Jarl died as he had wished to die, the last man on board his ship, with the soothing conviction that the Valkyrs would bear him to Valhalla.
The Valkyrs are Choosers of the Slain: a Destiny inexorable, which it is useless trying to bend or soften, has appointed who is to be slain; this was a fundamental point for the Norse believer; as indeed it is for all earnest men everywhere, for a Mahomet, a Luther, for a Napoleon too. It lies at the basis this for every such man; it is the woof out of which his whole system of thought is woven.
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