To indicate them briefly in detail, the first is a study of “Dionysus,” which touches with innumerable mystical and poetical suggestions the bright, gay, ruthless figure of the god, alive from head to foot, thrilling with the joy of life and beauty, and, with a divinely unassailed temperance of his own; as he passes lightly in his robe of skins, poising his wand with the bare brown arm, carrying in his hand the strange secret of the vine, its heady visions, its power of overwhelming by a sort of resistless, poisonous energy the mortal spirit, heightening and gilding on the one hand its bright fancies and sparkling dreams into a sort of mysterious rapture, an inner careless glee; and on the other hand sinking melancholy thoughts into an abandoned and exaggerated grief, and at last merging both joy and grief together into a deep stupor of mind and body. We Northerners, with the inherited taste for potent and ardent beverages, as resources to fight against our cheerless skies, our damp mists, our aching frosts, enlightened, too, by the later researches of natural philosophers, who have explained the magic of intoxication as a sort of unseemly poisoning of mind and body alike, are apt to view the effects of wine as an essentially grotesque and commonplace thing; we forget what a mystery this fierce excitement, this strange imported ecstasy of soul, the cloudy following lethargy might mean, would mean to those to whom the whole of life was a commerce with the divine, and who felt themselves surrounded by secret and unseen influences. And then, too, we must bear in mind that tendency of personification which lay so close to the heart of these old nations. With us it is all the other way; we tend to refer all things to a vast unity of law, to prodigious impersonal forces, thereby drawing, no doubt, nearer to truth, but further and further away from the romance that appeals to simple minds. Thus to the Greeks the worship of the grape was a discerning of “the spirit of fire and dew, alive and leaping in a thousand vines.” The rites of Dionysus were holy things, “breaths of remote nature ... the pines, the foldings of the hills, the leaping streams, the strange echoings and dying of sound on the heights.” Dionysus, thus, was a spirit of fire and dew; of fire first:—