312 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 



are too remote from our sympathies, although we recognise 

 their value as the first stage in the development of human 

 thought. We must not reject them as alien to ourselves, 

 or abhor them for their absurdities and indecencies. On 

 the contrary, it is our duty to use them as the keys to those 

 nobler forms of faith, which sprang up with the growth of 

 the progressive races. 



The secondary stages of mythology, when it has become 

 the vehicle of thoughts and feelings essentially akin to ours, 

 without losing its elder sense of the divinity in nature, are 

 those which still abound in artistic motives of the highest 

 beauty. Erudition enables us to approach the repositories of 

 Oriental, Scandinavian, Egyptian, Semitic, Hellenic wisdom 

 with intelligent insight. Yet we stand far enough aloof from 

 them to be dominated by no religious preoccupations, and no 

 local or national predilections. By the aid of criticism we can 

 divest the legends of the world's young prime of their archaic 

 trappings, and can discern what they preserve of permanent 

 truth and durable instruction. Taste and sympathy reveal 

 the large and simple grandeur of their outlines, the depth and 

 universality of their emotion. 



Examining a tale of Greek or Norse mythology, say the 

 story of Perseus or that of Balder, is like opening a sealed 

 jar of precious wine. Its fragrance spreads abroad through 

 all the palace of the soul ; and the noble vintage, upon being 

 tasted, courses through blood and brain with the matured elixir 

 of stored-up summers. 



Goethe says that he was wont to carry the subjects of his 

 poems many years unspoken in his mind. By this means 

 they became a portion of himself, secretly drawing nourish- 

 ment from all that he experienced and learned upon the 

 paths of life. When the time came to give them utterance 

 and form, it was found that they suggested more than at the 

 first glance met the ear and eye. They had acquired a many- 

 sidedness, a vitality, a power of varied application, from their 

 lengthy sojourn in secluded chambers of his consciousness. 

 Myths have the same incommensurable and inexhaustible 

 potency. Having slumbered for generations in the thought 



