cts is
different, the process the same.

But legends express the idealism of the masses; they are the highest
manifestations of spiritual life. The thinker's flights beyond the
confines of reality, the inventor's gift to join old materials in new
combinations, the artist's creative impulse, the poet's inspiration, the
seer's prophetic vision--every emanation from man's ideal nature clothes
itself with sinews, flesh, and skin, and lives in a people's legends,
the repositories of its art, poetry, science, and ethics.

Legends moreover are characteristic of a people's culture. As a child
delights in iridescent soap-bubbles, so a nation revels in
reminiscences. Though poetry lend words, painting her tints,
architecture a rule, sculpture a chisel, music her tones, the legend
itself is dead, and only a thorough understanding of national traits
enables one to recognize its ethical bearings. From this point of view,
the legend of the Polish king of a night is an important historical
argument, testifying to the satisfactory condition of the Jews of Poland
in the fifteenth and the sixteenth century. The simile that compares
nations, on the eve of a great revolution, to a seething crater, is true
despite its triteness, and if to any nation, is applicable to the Poland
of before and after that momentous session of the Diet. Egotism, greed,
ambition, vindictiveness, and envy added fuel to fire, and hastened
destruction. Jealousy had planted discord between two families, dividing
the state into hostile, embittered factions. Morality was undermined,
law trodden under foot, duty neglected, justice violated, the promptings
of good sense disregarded. So it came about that the land was flooded by
ruin as by a mighty stream, which, a tiny spring at first, gathers
strength and volume from its tributaries, and overflowing its bounds,
rushes over blooming meadows, fields, and pastures, drawing into its
destructive depths the peasant's every joy and hope. That is the soil
from which a legend like ours sprouts and grows.

This legend distinctly conveys an ethical lesson. The persecutions of
the Jews, their ceaseless wanderings from town to town, from country to
country, from continent to continent, have lasted two thousand years,
and how many dropped by the wayside! Yet they never parted with the
triple crown placed upon their heads by an ancient sage: the crown of
royalty, the crown of the Law, and the crown of a good name. Learning
and fai