sinia, as also to the mystic connection of Demeter with Dionysus.
She gave them bread: but they never forgot that she gave them the bread
of life. "She gave us," says the ancient Isocrates, "two gifts that are
the most excellent: fruits, that we might not live like beasts; and that
initiation, those who have part in which have sweeter hope,--both as
regards the close of life, and for all eternity." So Dionysus gave them
wine, not only to lighten the cares of life, but as a token, moreover,
of efficient deliverance from the fear of death, and of the higher joy
which he would give them in some happier world. And thus it is, that,
from the earliest times and in all the world, bread and wine have been
symbols of sacramental significance.

Human life so elevates all things with its exaltation and clothes them
with its glory, that nothing vain, nothing trifling, can be found within
its range. He who opposes himself to a single fact thus of necessity
opposes himself to the whole onward and upward current, and must fall.
We have heard of Thor, who with his magic mallet and his two celestial
comrades went to Joetunheim in quest of adventures: and we remember the
goblet which he could not exhaust because of its mysterious connection
with the inexhaustible Sea; the race with Hugi, which in the end proved
to be a race with Thought; and the wrestle with the old nurse Elli, who
was no other than Time herself, and therefore irresistible. So do we all
get us mallets ingeniously forged by the dark elves;--we try a race with
human thought, and look vainly to come out ahead; we laugh at things
because they are old, but with which we struggle to no purpose; and the
cup which we confidently put to our lips has no bottom;--in fact, the
great world of Joetunheim has grown for so long a time and so widely that
it is quite too much for us,--and its tall people, though we come down
upon them, like Thor and his companions, from celestial heights, are too
stout for our mallet.

Nothing human is so insignificant, but that, if you will give it time
and room, it will become irresistible. The plays of men become their
dramas; their holidays change to holy days. The representations, through
which, under various names, they have repeated to themselves the glory
and the tragedy of their life,--old festivals once celebrated in Egypt
far back beyond the dimmest myths of human remembrance,--the mystic
drama of the Eleusinia, which we have been considering i