A mythology that broods over us in our
cradles, that mingles with the lullaby of the nurse and the
winter-evening legends of the chimney-corner, that brightens day with the
possibility of divine encounters, and darkens night with intimations of
demonic ambushes, is of other substance than one which we take down from
our bookcase, sapless as the shelf it stood on, and remote from all
present sympathy with man or nature as a town history. It is something
like the difference between live metaphor and dead personification.
Primarily, the action of the imagination is the same in the mythologizer
and the poet, that is, it forces its own consciousness on the objects of
the senses, and compels them to sympathize with its own momentary
impressions. When Shakespeare in his "Lucrece" makes
"The threshold grate the door to have him heard,"
his mind is acting under the same impulse that first endowed with human
feeling and then with human shape all the invisible forces of nature, and
called into being those
"Fair humanities of old religion,"
whose loss the poets mourn. So also Shakespeare no doubt projected
himself in his own creations; but those creations never became so
perfectly disengaged from him, so objective, or, as they used to say,
extrinsical, to him, as to react upon him like real and even alien
existences.
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