,
(the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the invention of the
mechanic arts and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history of
religion, with some closeness to the faith of later ages. Prometheus is
the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the friend of man; stands between
the unjust "justice" of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and
readily suffers all things on their account. But where it departs from
the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, it
represents a state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine
of Theism is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the
self-defence of man against this untruth, namely a discontent with the
believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the obligation
of reverence is onerous. It would steal if it could the fire of the
Creator, and live apart from him and independent of him. The Prometheus
Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true to all time are the
details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus,
said the poets. When the gods come among men, they are not known. Jesus
was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by
the gripe of Hercules, but every time he touched his mother earth his
strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness
both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation
with nature. The power of music, the power of poetry, to unfix and as it
were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. The
philosophical perception of identity through endless mutations of
form makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept
yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood
and ran? And what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus?
I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any
fact, because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but
a name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the
waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of
the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were; but
men and women are only half human. Every animal of the barn-yard, the
field and the forest, of the earth and of the waters that are under
the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its
features and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-facing
s