dialect, and its complex and shifting terms will translate themselves into reality, and show how far legend, in its sympathetic fictions of war, love, crime, adventure, fate, is only telling the perennial story of the world's daily life. The myths shaped out of those endless analogies between man and nature which are the soul of all poetry, into those half-human stories still so full to us of unfading life and beauty, are the masterpieces of an art belonging rather to the past than to the present. The growth of myth has been checked by science, it is dying of weights and measures, of proportions and specimens — it is not only dying, but half dead, and students are anatomising it. In this world one must do what one can, and if the moderns cannot feel myth as their forefathers did, at least they can analyse it. There is a kind of intellectual frontier within which he must be who will sympathise with myth, while he must be without who will investigate it, and it is our fortune that we live near this frontier-line, and can go in and out. European scholars can still in a measure understand the belief of Greeks or Aztecs or Maoris in their native myths, and at the same time can compare and interpret them without the scruples of men to whom such tales are history, and even sacred history. Moreover, were the whole human race at a uniform level of culture with ourselves, it would be hard to bring our minds to conceive of tribes in the mental state to which the early growth of nature-myth belongs, even as it is now hard to picture to ourselves a condition of mankind lower than any that has been actually found. But the various grades of existing civilization preserve the landmarks of a long course of history, and there survive by millions savages and barbarians whose minds still produce, in rude archaic forms, man's early mythic representations of nature.
Those who read for the first time the dissertations of the modern school of mythologists, and sometimes even those who have been familiar with them for years, are prone to ask, with half-incredulous appreciation of the beauty and
