But even the Germanic gods and heroes are surrounded this rebuffing immensity and enigmatic gloom. They are steeped in music and in night, for daylight gives visual bounds and therefore shapes bodily

But even the
Germanic gods and heroes are surrounded this rebuffing immensity and
enigmatic gloom. They are steeped in music and in night, for daylight gives
visual bounds and therefore shapes bodily things. Night eliminates body, day
soul. Apollo and Athene have no souls. On Olympus rests the eternal light of
the transparent southern day, and Apollo’s hour is high noon, when great Pan
sleeps. But Valhalla is light-less, and even in the Eddas we can trace that deep
midnight of Faust’s study-broodings, the midnight that is caught Rem-
brandt’s etchings and absorbs Beethoven's tone colours. No Wotan or Baldur
or Freya has form. Of them, as of the Vedic gods of India, it can
be said that they suffer not ‘‘any graven image or any likeness
and this impossibility carries an implicit recognition that eternal space, and not
the corporeal copy which levels them down, desecrates them, denies them
is the supreme symbol.