past, we see men and women walking in the twilight--dim and uncertain
forms indeed, yet stately and heroic.

Now all this has a bearing upon the main subject of our present study.
Meteorology and astronomy are indeed noble sciences, but the proper
study of mankind is man. While, no doubt, the sources of all early
folk-lore are composite, yet it matters greatly for the student of these
things whether the beginnings of religious thought were merely in the
clouds, or whether they had their roots in the same earth whereon we
live and labour. The heroes and great people of the early days are
eternal figures, because each new generation gives them a resurrection
in its own life and experience. They have eternal human meanings,
beneath whatever pageantry of sun and stars the ancient heroes passed
from birth to death. Soon everything of them is forgotten except the
ideas about human life for which they stand. Then each of them becomes
the expression of a thought common to humanity, and therefore secure of
its immortality to the end of time; for the undying interest is the
human interest, and all ideas which concern the life of man are immortal
while man's race lasts. In the case of such legends as those we are
discussing, it is probable that beyond the mere story some such ideal of
human life was suggested from the very first. Certainly, as time went
on, the ideal became so identified with the hero, that to thoughtful men
he came to stand for a particular idealism of human experience. Thus
Pater speaks of Dionysus as from first to last a type of second birth,
opening up the hope of a possible analogy between the resurrections of
nature and something else, reserved for human souls. "The beautiful,
weeping creatures, vexed by the wind, suffering, torn to pieces, and
rejuvenescent again at last, like a tender shoot of living green out of
the hardness and stony darkness of the earth, becomes an emblem or ideal
of chastening and purification, and of final victory through suffering."