GENERAL REMARKS ON MYTHICAL NARRATIVES. 34J marvellous, which has in modern limes become the province of fiction proper. It is difficult, we may say impossible, for a man of mature age to carry back his mind to his conceptions such as they stood when he was a child, growing naturally out of his imagination and feel- ings, working upon a scanty stock of materials, and borrowing from authorities whom he blindly followed but imperfectly appre- hended. A similar difficulty occurs when we attempt to place ourselves in the historical and quasi-philosophical point of view which the ancient mythes present to us. We can follow perfect- ly the imagination and feeling which dictated these tales, and we can admire and sympathize with them as animated, sublime, and affecting poetry ; but we are too much accustomed to matter of fact and philosophy of a positive kind, to be able to conceive a time when these beautiful fancies were construed literally and accepted as serious reality. Nevertheless it is obvious that Grecian mythes cannot be either understood or appreciated except with reference to the system of conceptions and belief of the ages in which they arose. We must suppose a public not reading and writing, but seeing, hear- ing and telling destitute of all records, and careless as well as ignorant of positive history with its indispensable tests, yet at the same time curious and full of eagerness for new or impressive incidents strangers even to the rudiments of positive philoso- phy and to the idea of invariable sequences of nature either in the physical or moral world, yet requiring some connecting the- ory to interpret and regularize the phenomena before them. Such a theory was supplied by the spontaneous inspirations of an early fancy, which supposed the habitual agency of beings intelligent and voluntary like themselves, but superior in extent of power, and different in peculiarity of attributes. In the geographical ideas of the Homeric period, the earth was flat and round, with the deep and gentle ocean-stream flowing around and returning into itself: chronology, or means of measuring past time, there existed none ; but both unobserved regions might be described, the forgotten past unfolded, and the unknown future predicted through particular men specially inspired by the gods, or endow- ed by them with that peculiar vision which detected and inter preted passing signs and omens.
