expert in hunting the parable through all the protean shapes in which it is presented to us. The heroes of the old stories we have long loved begin to lose their individuality and character for us. And instead of thinking of Apollo, and Osiris, and Theseus, and Herakles, and Thor as separate idealizations of heroic or godlike character; of Ariadne, and Idun, and Isis as heroines of pathetic histories, our thoughts as we read are busied in tracing all that is said about them to the aspects of the sun in his march across the heavens, through the vicissitudes of a bright and thundery eastern, or a gusty northern, day, and the tenderly glowing and fading colours of the western sky into which he sinks when his course is run. Our first feeling on receiving this simple explanation of the old stories of mythology is rather one of disappointment than of satisfaction; we feel that we are losing a great deal--not the interest of the stories only, but all those glimpses of deep moral meanings, of yearnings after Divine teachers and rulers, of acknowledgment of the possibility of communion between God and man, which we had hitherto found in them, and which we are sure that the original makers of them could not have been without. It seems to rob the old religions of the essence of religion--spirituality--and reduce them to mere observations of natural phenomena, due rather to the bodily senses than to any instincts or necessities of the soul. But here the science of language, with which we were about to quarrel as having robbed us, comes in to restore to the old beliefs those very elements of mystery, awe, and yearning towards the invisible, which we were fearing to see vanish away. As is usually the case on looking deeper, we shall find that the explanation which seemed at first to impoverish really enhances the beauty and worth of the subject brought into clearer light. It teaches us to see something more in what we have been used to call mere nature-worship than appears at first sight.