For thee soft crowns in thine untrampled mead I weave, my lady, and to thee I bear; Thither no shepherd drives his flocks to feed, Nor scythe of steel has ever laboured there; Nay, through the spring among the blossoms fair The brown bee comes and goes, and with good heed Thy maiden, Reverence, sweet streams doth lead About the grassy close that is her care! Souls only that are gracious and serene By gift of God, in human lore unread, May pluck these holy blooms and grasses green That now I wreathe for thine immortal head, I who may walk with thee, thyself unseen, And by thy whispered voice am comforted. In passages like this we find the truly _natural_ religion, the religion to which man's nature tends, "groaning and travailing" till the goal is won, But it is long in the winning; the paths are rough; humanity is "led by a way that it knew not". DIONYSUS. Among deities whose origin has been sought in the personification, if not of the phenomena, at least of the forces of Nature, Dionysus is prominent.* He is regarded by many mythologists** as the "spiritual form" of the new vernal life, the sap and pulse of vegetation and of the new-born year, especially as manifest in the vine and the juice of the grape. Thus Preller*** looks on his mother, Semele, as a personification of the pregnant soil in spring.**** The name of Semele is explained with the familiar diversity of conjecture. Whether the human intellect, at the time of the first development of myth, was capable of such abstract thought as is employed in the recognition of a deity presiding over "the revival of earth-life" or not, and whether, having attained to this abstraction, men would go on to clothe it in all manner of animal and other symbolisms, are questions which mythologists seem to take for granted. The popular story of the birth of Dionysus is well known. * It is needless to occupy space with the etymological guesses at the sense of the name "Dionysus". Greek, Sanskrit and Assyrian have been tortured by the philologists, but refuse to give up their secret, and Curtis does not even offer a conjecture (Or. Etym., 609). ** Preller, i. 544. *** i. 546. **** The birth of Dionysus is recorded (Iliad, xiv. 323; Hesiod, Theog., 940) without the story of the death of Semele, which occurs in Æschylus, Frg., 217-218; Eurip., Bacchæ, i. 3.