rested a hand on the glittering silex of a vineyard slope in August, where the pale globes of sweetness lie, does not feel this? It is out of the bitter salts of a smitten, volcanic soil that it comes up with the most curious virtues. The mother faints and is parched up by the heat which brings the child 5 to the birth; and it pierces through a wonder of freshness, drawing its everlasting green and typical coolness out of the midst of the ashes, its own stem becoming at last like a tangled mass of tortured metal. In thinking of Dionysus, then, as fire-born, the Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment, 10 the poetry, of all tender things which grow out of a hard soil, or in any sense blossom before the leaf, like the little mezereon-plant of English gardens, with its pale-purple, winescented flowers upon the leafless twigs in February, or like the almond-trees of Tuscany, or Aaron's rod that budded, or the 15 staff in the hand of the Pope when Tannhäuser is saved.

And his second birth is of the dew. The fire of which he was born would destroy him in his turn as it withered up his mother; a second danger comes: from this the plant is protected by the influence of the cooling cloud, the lower part 20 of his father the sky, in which it is wrapped and hidden, and of which it is born again, its second mother being, in some versions of the legend, Hyé, the Dew. The nursery where Zeus places it to be brought up is a cave in Mount Nysa, sought by a misdirected ingenuity in many lands, but really, 25 like the place of the carrying away of Persephone, a place of fantasy, the oozy place of springs in the hollow of the hillside, nowhere and everywhere, where the vine was "invented." The nymphs of the trees overshadow it from above; the nymphs of the springs sustain it from below-the Hyades, 30 those first leaping mænads, who, as the springs become rainclouds, go up to heaven among the stars, and descend again, as dew or shower, upon it; so that the religion of Dionysus connects itself, not with tree-worship only, but also with ancient water-worship, the worship of the spiritual forms of 35 springs and streams. To escape from his enemies Dionysus leaps into the sea, the original of all rain and springs, whence, in early spring, the women of Elis and Argos were wont to

call him, with the singing of a hymn. And again, in thus commemorating Dionysus as born of the dew, the Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment, the poetry, of water. For not the heat only, but the solace of it-the freshness of the 5 cup-this too was felt by those people of the vineyard, whom the prophet Melampus had taught to mix always their wine with water, and with whom the watering of the vines became a religious ceremony, the very dead, as they thought, drinking of and refreshed by the stream. And who that has ever felt 10 the heat of a southern country does not know this poetry, the motive of the loveliest of all the works attributed to Giorgione, the Fête Champêtre in the Louvre-the intense sensations, the subtle, far-reaching symbolisms, which, in these places, cling about the touch and sound and sight of it? 15 Think of the darkness of the well in the breathless court, with the delicate ring of ferns kept alive just within the opening of it; of the sound of the fresh water flowing through the wooden pipes into the houses of Venice, on summer mornings; of the cry, “Acqua frésca!" at Padua or Verona, when the people 20 run to buy what they prize, in its rare purity, more than wine, bringing pleasures so full of exquisite appeal to the imagination that in these streets the very beggars, one thinks, might exhaust all the philosophy of the epicurean.

Out of all these fancies comes the vine-growers' god, the 25 spiritual form of fire and dew. Beyond the famous representations of Dionysus in later art and poetry-the Baccha of Euripides, the statuary of the school of Praxiteles,-a multitude of literary allusions, epithets, local customs carry us back to this world of vision unchecked by positive knowl30 edge, in which the myth is begotten among a primitive people, as they wondered over the life of the thing their hands helped forward, till it became a kind of spirit and their culture of it a kind of worship. Dionysus, as we see him in art and poetry, is the projected expression of the ways and dreams 35 of this primitive people, brooded over and harmonized by the energetic Greek imagination; the religious imagination of the Greeks being, precisely, a unifying, or identifying, power, bringing together things naturally asunder, making, for in

stance, for human body a soul of waters, for human soul flesh of flowers; welding into something like the identity of a human personality the whole range of man's experiences of a given object or series of objects-all their outward qualities, and the visible facts regarding them; all the hidden ordi- 5 nances by which those facts and qualities hold of unseen forces, and have their roots in purely visionary places.

Robert Louis Stevenson,

1850-1894.

ES TRIPLEX.

(From Virginibus Puerisque, 1881.)

The changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents

5 because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege, and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which many 10 subsidiary friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night. Again, in taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence 15 a whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind, from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees of mediæval Europe. The poorest persons have a bit of pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show 20 of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door. All this and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put humanity 25 in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle and swiftness, in leaving

people little time to think, have not left them time enough to go dangerously wrong in practice.

As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few have less influence on conduct under healthy circumstances. 5 We have all heard of cities in South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous neighborhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in the greenest corner of England. There are 10 serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble man and his merry-making in the dust. In the eyes of very young 15 people and very dull old ones, there is something indescribably reckless and desperate in such a picture. It seems not credible that respectable married people, with umbrellas, should find appetite for a bit of supper within quite a long distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary life begins to smell 20 of high-handed debauch when it is carried on so close to a catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems, could hardly be relished in such circumstances without something like a defiance of the Creator. It should be a place for nobody but hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere born-25 devils drowning care in a perpetual carouse.

And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the situation of these South American citizens forms only a very pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind. This world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in overcrowded space, 30 among a million other worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in contrary directions, may very well come by a knock that would set it into explosion like a penny squib. And what, pathologically looked at, is the human body, with all its organs, but a mere bagful of petards? The least of these is 35 as dangerous to the whole economy as the ship's powdermagazine to the ship; and with every breath we breathe and every meal we eat we are putting one or more of them in