blossom before the leaf, like the little mezereon-plant of English
gardens, with its pale-purple, wine-scented flowers upon the leafless
twigs in February, or like the almond-trees of Tuscany, or Aaron's
rod that budded, or the staff in the hand of the Pope when
Tannhauser's repentance is accepted.

And his second birth is of the dew. The fire of which he was born
would destroy him in [27] his turn, as it withered up his mother; a
second danger comes; from this the plant is protected by the
influence of the cooling cloud, the lower part of his father the sky,
in which it is wrapped and hidden, and of which it is born again, its
second mother being, in some versions of the legend, Hye--the Dew.
The nursery, where Zeus places it to be brought up, is a cave in
Mount Nysa, sought by a misdirected ingenuity in many lands, but
really, like the place of the carrying away of Persephone, a place of
fantasy, the oozy place of springs in the hollow of the hillside,
nowhere and everywhere, where the vine was "invented." The nymphs of
the trees overshadow it from above; the nymphs of the springs sustain
it from below--the Hyades, those first leaping maenads, who, as the
springs become rain-clouds, go up to heaven among the stars, and
descend again, as dew or shower, upon it; so that the religion of
Dionysus connects itself, not with tree-worship only, but also with
ancient water-worship, the worship of the spiritual forms of springs
and streams. To escape from his enemies Dionysus leaps into the sea,
the original of all rain and springs, whence, in early summer, the
women of Elis and Argos were wont to call him, with the singing of a
hymn. And again, in thus commemorating Dionysus as born of the dew,
the Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment, the poetry, of water.
For not the heat only, but its solace--the freshness of the [28] cup-
-this too was felt by those people of the vineyard, whom the prophet