There are many beautiful myths existing to-day in prose and poetry. In the tribal species, there is the great mass of Greek and Roman early religious stories and there are the Oriental and the Norse cycles. In the artificial group there are the later Greek and Roman myths like those devised by Plato and Plutarch, and there are our more modern beautiful creations with myth elements like Milton's "Comus" and many of the poems of Keats, where not only the incidents are newly made but the deities also. In prose we have the delightful "Wonder Book," which Hawthorne prepared for children. We have become so familiar with "Paradise Lost" that we hardly realize that it is essentially myth--a great seer's expression of the anthropomorphism of his people. Like a true bard of old, Milton added much also to his people's thinking on the universe. How much he added we see fully only when we deliberately compare the extension and concreteness of his account with the meagerness of the Hebrew Scriptures. [Myth age not a past epoch] An error we are liable to fall into concerning myths is that of presuming that they are wholly things of the past; that nowadays nobody believes in them or tells them. In fact, many persons and many tribes believe in them and tell them. The myth age is not a past epoch, but a condition of thinking. It is always present somewhere and present to some extent always among all races. The primitive tribes of the Philippines believe implicitly in their myths. The Bontoc Igorots, for example, tell how the Moon woman, Kabigat, cut off the head of a child of the Sun man, Chal-chal, and thus taught head-hunting to earth people; some of them tell, too, how Coling, the Serpent Eagle, was made, and happens to be always hovering over their pueblo. Even the youngest child knows how the rice-bird came about, and why an Igorot never harms O-wug, the snake. These stories are being gathered to-day by American scientists and are being written down for the first time. The native college students of the Islands have joined in a movement to preserve the traditions of the more civilized tribes also, and are industriously putting into written form the stories of their people. Most of these are not beliefs that are past, but beliefs about the past--a distinction noteworthy to the student of myths. Little children of all races are naturally in a myth age, and many of their imaginings are as beautiful as those of the old Greeks, and, if made known, would be as contributive to literature, I dare say. Poets are but grown-up children to whom Nature makes a continued concrete appeal, and they are always thinking myth-wise, we well know.