heroes are no heroes at all, should only be advanced with the greatest caution, for it is partly in such traits as will appear shortly, that the poetical relation between gods and men is preserved. It is another matter, and we have nothing left us but prose, when in addition the powers, which are posited as substantive individuals, are mere empty shadows, the creations of the caprice of fancy and the arbitrariness of a false originality. They are then for the most part only the adjuncts of superstition or imbecility. (_β_) The truly poetic relation of ideality consists, then, in the identity of gods and men; and this must assert itself even though the universal powers are presented as independent and free from the particularity of human beings and passions. In other words, all that we attribute to the gods must at the same time establish itself as that which is essentially cognate with the spiritual life of particular men in this sense, that while the dominating powers appear as essentially personified, yet at the same time all that is thus posited in an external relation to man is none the less clearly that which is immanent in his own spirit and character. The true function of the artist is, therefore, to introduce a mediating link between the difference involved in these two aspects, to bind them, in short, by a finely conceived thread of relation which, while clearly emphasizing their springs in the spiritual life of man, shall make no less visible the universal and essential element which is therein implied and present such to the imagination in individual form. The emotional life of man must reveal itself in the gods, who, in fact, are the self-subsistent and universal embodiments of that which is active and dominant in his own spiritual experience. Then alone are the gods at the same time gods in cognate relation with his own heart and emotions. When, for example, we are told by the ancients that Venus or Amor has put a constraint upon the heart, no doubt in the first place these divinities are apprehended as external powers; but human love is equally a stimulus and a passion, which is implanted in the heart and is part of that it independently contains.