e gone, the gentle breezes are
gone; and man too must go, go mingle with the pale people of
dreams. But not wholly and forever shall he die. The sun soars
into new day from the embrace of night; summer restored hastens on
the heels of retreating winter; vegetation but retires and surely
returns, and the familiar song of the birds shall sweeten the
renewing woods afresh for a million springs. Apollo weeping over
the beauteous and darling boy, his slain and drooped Hyacinthus,
is the sun shorn of his fierce beams and mourning over the annual
wintry desolation: it is also Nature bewailing the remediless loss
of man, her favorite companion. It was these general analogies and
suggestions, striking the imagination, affecting the heart,
enlisting the reason, wrought out, personified, and dramatized by
poets, taken up with a mass of other associated matter by priestly
societies and organized in a scheme of legendary doctrine and an
imposing ritual, that constituted the basis and the central
meaning of the old Mysteries; and not a vapid tradition about Noah
and his ark.

The aim of these institutions as they were wielded was threefold;
and in each particular they exerted tremendous power. The first
object was to stretch over the wicked the restraining influence of
a doctrine of future punishment, to fill them with a fearful
looking for judgment in the invisible world. And a considerable
proportion of this kind of fear among the ancients is to be traced
to the secret influence of the Mysteries, the revelations and
terrors there applied. The second desire was to encourage the good
and obedient with inspiring hopes of a happy fate and glorious
rewards beyond the grave. Plutarch writes to his wife, (near the
close of his letter of consolation to her,) "Some say the soul
will be entirely insensible after death; but you are too well
acquainted with the doctrines delivered in the Mysteries of
Bacchus, and with the symbols of our fraternity, to harbor such an
error." The third purpose was, by the wonders and splendors, the
secret awe, the mysterious authority and venerable sanctions,
thrown around the society and its ceremonies, to establish its
doctrines in the reverential acceptance of the people, and thus to
increase the power of the priesthood and the state. To compass
these ends, the hidden science, the public force, the vague
superstition, the treasured wealth, and all the varied resources
available by the ancient world, were m