The phenomena of nature, imaginatively represented, were not
long in becoming myths. These the primal poets reproduced again as
symbols, no longer of physical, but of moral truths. By and by the
professional poets, in search of a subject, are struck by the fund of
picturesque material lying unused in them, and work them up once more as
narratives, with appropriate personages and decorations. Thence they take
the further downward step into legend, and from that to superstition. How
many metamorphoses between the elder Edda and the Nibelungen, between
Arcturus and the "Idyls of the King"! Let a good, thorough-paced proser
get hold of one of these stories, and he carefully desiccates them of
whatever fancy may be left, till he has reduced them to the proper
dryness of fact. King Lycaon, grandson by the spindleside of Oceanus,
after passing through all the stages I have mentioned, becomes the
ancestor of the werwolf. Ovid is put upon the stand as a witness, and
testifies to the undoubted fact of the poor monarch's own
metamorphosis:--
"Territus ipse fugit, nactusque silentia ruris
Exululat, frustraque loqui conatur."
Does any one still doubt that men may be changed into beasts? Call
Lucian, call Apuleius, call Homer, whose story of the companions of
Ulysses made swine of by Circe, says Bodin, _n'est pas fable_.
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