CHAPTER III.
THE SOURCE OF MYTHICAL SPEECH.
BOOK. I.
The infancy of mankind.If the analysis of language and the researches of antiquarians bring before us, in the earliest annals of mankind, a state of society which bears to our own a resemblance not greater than that of infancy to mature manhood, we shall scarcely realise that primæval condition of thought except by studying closely the mind of children. Stubborn facts disclose as the prominent characteristics of that early time the selfishness and violence, the cruelty and slavishness of savages; yet the mode in which they regarded the external world became a source of inexhaustible beauty, a fountain of the most exquisite and touching poetry. So true to nature and so lovely are the forms into which their language passed, as they spoke of the manifold phases of the changing year; so deep is the tenderness with which they describe the death of the sun-stricken dew, the brief career of the short-lived sun, and the agony of the earth-mother mourning for her summer-child, that we are tempted to reflect back upon the speakers the purity and truthfulness of their words. If the theory of a corrupted revelation as the origin of mythology imputes to whole nations a gross and wilful profanity which consciously travesties the holiest things, the simplicity of thought which belongs to the earliest myths presents, as some have urged, a picture of primæval humanity too fair and flattering.
