THE GIANT'S ALTAR. 187 longs, though a very patriotic German, would very much enjoy furnishing a monument to commemorate a battle, in which his son and his troops were beaten and taken prisoners. Not far distant from the column lies an immense rough block of granite, with a complete step cut in it, and a deep incision made by a saw above, as if the commencement of another. It goes by the name of the Giant's Altar. Lucus erat longo nunquam violatus ab ævo hic barbara ritu, Sacra deûm structæ diris altaribus aræ, Scattered about in the wood near, are many other blocks with similar traces of workmanship—some of them presenting in the incisions the marks of wedges, as perfect as if recently made. Some antiquaries have attributed the column, and these vestiges of art, to a commencement, by the ancient Germans, to erect a temple to their god Odin, who gives his name. to this wild district. Tacitus mentions the German custom of consecrating woods. to their gods, and calling them by their names "lucos ac nemora consecrant, deorumque nominibus appellant." He also states that Mercury was a principal object of their worship-" deorum maxime Mercurium colunt.” Now Odin is generally considered to be the Mercury of the Northern mythology, as Frigga was the Venus, and Thor the Northern Hercules. Cottle, in his preface to his translation of the Edda, has classified the whole Pantheon of the North with great exactness, and pointed out the resemblance of their various attributes, to, what he conceives, their counterparts among the more interesting denizens of Olympús. In his catalogue, Odin appears to have been a sort of compound of Adonis and Mercury. He was beloved by Frigga (Venus) and killed by a wolf, as Adonis was by a boar--but then he was the god of Eloquence, and presided over the souls of the departed, when they arrived at Valhalla, as Mercury did in the "lætis sedibus" of Elysium. Notwithstanding, however, all that may be said in support of the conjecture, that the column is a remnant of the temple of Odin, yet it hardly seems probable that the good Germans, in the days when they 3 THE SEA OF ROCKS. 189 worshipped Thor, Odin, and Frigga, were proficients in the art of hewing and rounding granite, which their enlightened descendants of the eighteenth century could barely scratch. years, and ves every Others ascribe the work to the middle ages: but there appears, I think, more reason in giving the credit of it to the Romans, who were established in this part of Germany for near three hundred tiges of whose encampments abound where in the Forest of Odin, which formed then a part of the Agri Decumates. Of this latter opinion was a curious kind of village antiquary from the neighbourhood, who was loitering about among the granites with his rule and his spade, and who reasoned to me in barbarous Germanized French on the depth and shape of the marks and incisions -summing up all his theories with " Foila, Monsieur, ce qui she pense." On pursuing the declivity a little lower, we came to a work of nature no less remarkable than those of art which we had just left-the Felsen Meer, or Sea of Rocks. The name accurately describes the object. A sort of gully or channel in the side of the mountain is filled with piles of huge shapeless granites, heaped one on the other in the rudest disorder. The singularity of the object is increased by the roundness of the rocks, which, unlike the mossy angular masses in the neighbourhood, are here bare and rounded off, as if by attrition-like pebbles on the sea shore. The hollow position of the masses gives to the whole pile, which extends a considerable way down the mountain, the character of a sort of avalanche ofrocks-which would seem to have been hurled, by a convulsion of nature, from the summit into their present situation. Superstition, however, which is the same among all people, has here unconsciously hit upon the poetical fable which it suggested to a very different race, and ascribes them to certain Giants, who, in fighting together, hurled them at each other. A country like the Forest of Odin has not failed to suggest to so imaginative a people as the Germans, many traditions not less wild and romantic. At no great distance from the Feldsberg, is the Castle of Rodenstein, on the top of a wild wooded mountain. Here, as the tale goes, resides the Knight of Ro SUPERSTITIONS IN THE FOREST. 191 denstein, or the wild Jäger, who, issuing from his ruins, announces the approach of war by traversing the air with a noisy armament, to the Castle of Schnellerts, situated on a solitary mountain opposite. The strange noises heard on the eve of battles, are authenticated by affidavits preserved in the village-and some persons profess to have been convinced by their eyes as well as their ears. In this manner the people assert that they were forewarned of the victories of Leipsic and Waterloo. This superstition reminds one of the still wilder one of the inhabitants of the plains near the Andes, who fancy a thunder-storm a battle between their enemies and their countrymen-and express their fears in loud shrieks, if the clouds appear driven back towards their own district-but hail with shouts of joy their motion towards the enemies' country as the signal of their flight and defeat. The flying army of Rodenstein may probably be owing to as simple a cause, as the aërial battles of the Araucanians. The power of the wind is very great, and its roar singularly solemn and sonorous in these vast districts of forest. In the pine forests it sometimes tears |