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Updated: June 16, 2025
Suddenly at length it stood revealed. A gigantic face, with wide-floating hair and beard, looked down into Balder's own. Its expression was of infinite malignity and despair. The impersonation of all that is wicked and miserable, its place was at the top of Heaven; it was moulded of those aspiring forms of light, and was the goal which the brightest attained.
He would not forestall her enlightenment from the grim page of his own experience. But do not many pure and loving souls pass through the world without once noticing how bad most of the roads are, and how vexed the climates? So might not the earthly heaven of Gnulemah's imagination tenderly blind her to the unheavenly earth of Balder's knowledge?
Men and women and little children, missing the light that had once fallen into their hearts and homes, sobbed with bitter grief; the birds of the air, who had sung carols of joy at the gates of the morning since time began, were full of sorrow; the beasts of the fields crouched and moaned in their desolation; the great trees, that had put on their robes of green at Balder's command, sighed as the wind wailed through them; and the sweet flowers, that waited for Balder's footstep and sprang up in all the fields to greet him, hung their frail blossoms and wept bitterly for the love and the warmth and the light that had gone out.
But he was puzzled to observe that it appeared to throw Nurse into a state of agitation as great as though she had herself been the perpetrator of Balder's crime! She stood quaking and irresolute, now peeping for a moment from behind her screen, then dodging back with an increase of panic. This display rendered more uncouth by its voicelessness revolted the æsthetic sensibilities of Helwyse.
Be that as it may, certain it is that the mistletoe, the instrument of Balder's death, has been regularly gathered for the sake of its mystic qualities on Midsummer Eve in Scandinavia, Balder's home. The plant is found commonly growing on pear-trees, oaks, and other trees in thick damp woods throughout the more temperate parts of Sweden.
He might have stood for our age; she, for that more primitive but profounder era which is at once man's beginning and his goal. Balder's eyes could not frankly hold their own against her gaze of awful simplicity. All he had ever done amiss arose and put him to the blush.
Though fallen, there was in him somewhat giant-like, perhaps easier to see now than before, as the ruin seems vaster than the perfect building. The travail of a soul like Balder's must issue greatly, whether for good or ill. He could not remain long inchoate, but the elements would combine to make something either darker or fairer than had been before.
After Balder's death the gods felt that they had little to make them happy. Their thoughts dwelt always on their loss, or on their desire to punish Loki; and in neither of these thoughts was there any joy, for to the pure minds of the gods, the thought of violence could bring nothing but pain.
All this was conveyed to Balder's apprehension, not by words, but by some subtile expressiveness of eye and gesture. Gnulemah could give voiceless utterances in a manner pregnant and felicitous almost beyond belief. "I meet also a beautiful maiden in the looking-glass," she added; "her face and motion are always the same as my own.
Beneath the solemn excitement and perplexity, lay warm and secure in his heart the thought of Gnulemah, his wife. Blessed thought! which the whips and scorns of time should make but more tenderly dear and precious. As he breathed the incense-laden air of the temple, Balder's face grew stern. At each step he thought to see death in some ghastly form.
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