which is affirmed by the adjective element as great or small, as strong or weak, as beautiful or ugly, or any attribute expressed by a qualifying adjective, is reënforced by a poetic similitude. The attribute or the person acting in a specified capacity is always like something else, and the poetry in this stage is filled with elaborately developed similitudes. The best illustrations of this characteristic of poetry are found in Homer, but they may be found in all the poetry of the upper stage of tribal society. Opening at random a copy of Bryant’s Odyssey, on the first page I chance to see I find this passage:
. . . for sure
I never looked on one of mortal race,
Woman or man, like thee, and as I gaze
I wonder. Like to thee I saw of late,
In Delos, a young palm-tree growing up
Beside Apollo’s altar ; for I sailed
To Delos, with much people following me,
On a disastrous voyage. Long I gazed
Upon it wonder-struck, as I am now,—
For never from the earth so fair a tree
Had sprung. So marvel I, and am amazed
At thee, O lady, and in awe forbear
To clasp thy knees.
In this stage of poetry qualification is used as a poetic element as in the first; then qualities are personified as well as bodies, and qualification is reenforced by similitude.
Allegory—In the third stage of society certain world attributes are explained as world elements: these are earth, air, fire, and water, and the proportion of these elements in bodies of the earth gives rise to their attributes. In philosophy this is alchemy; but it is only the alchemy of bodies, while the ghosts are psychic beings and only psychic attributes are personified.
A gulf now exists between ghost and body. The ghost is spirit or essence, something which can be distilled and which may pervade space like an aroma, or itself be wholly spaceless and hence formless. It may occupy any point of time present,
