and fading along breast, and throat, and opened
wings, infinite as the dividing of the foam and the sifting of the
sea-sand; even the white down of the cloud seeming to flutter up between
the stronger plumes,--seen, but too soft for touch.

And so the Spirit of the Air is put into, and upon, this created form;
and it becomes, through twenty centuries, the symbol of divine help,
descending, as the Fire, to speak but as the Dove, to bless.

67. Next, in the serpent we approach the source of a group of myths,
world-wide, founded on great and common human instincts, respecting which
I must note one or two points which bear intimately on all our subject.
For it seems to me that the scholars who are at present occupied in
interpretation of human myths have most of them forgotten that there are
any such thing as natural myths, and that the dark sayings of men may be
both difficult to read, and not always worth reading. And, indeed, all
guidance to the right sense of the human and variable myths will probably
depend on our first getting at the sense of the natural and invariable
ones. The dead hieroglyph may have meant this or that; the living
hieroglyph means always the same; but remember, it is just as much a
hieroglyph as the other; nay, more,--a "sacred or reserved sculpture," a
thing with an inner language. The serpent crest of the king's crown, or
of the god's, on the pillars of Egypt, is a mystery, but the serpent
itself, gliding past the pillar's foot, is it less a mystery? Is there,
indeed, no tongue, except the mute forked flash from its lips, in that
running brook of horror on the ground?

68. Why that horror? We all feel it, yet how imaginative it is, how
disproportioned to the real strength of the creature! There is more
poison in an ill-kept drain, in a pool of dish-washing at a cottage door,
than in the deadliest asp of Nile. Every back yard which you look down
into from the railway as it carries you out by Vauxhall or Deptford,
holds its coiled serpent; all the walls of those ghastly suburbs are
enclosures of tank temples for serpent worship; yet you feel no horror in
looking down into them as you would if you saw the livid scales, and
lifted head. There is more venom, mortal, inevitable, in a single word,
sometimes, or in the gliding entrance of a wordless thought than ever
"vanti Libia con sua rena." But that horror is of the myth, not of the
creature. There are myriads lower than this, and more l