de, and lack of sympathy of its ministers, gives up in
despair, and returns to drown his anxieties in his old debauchery.

But this is not the primitive form of the myth, which recurs in the
folk-lore of every people of Aryan descent. Who, indeed, can read it
without being at once reminded of Thomas of Erceldoune (or Horsel-hill),
entranced by the sorceress of the Eilden; of the nightly visits of Numa
to the grove of the nymph Egeria; of Odysseus held captive by the Lady
Kalypso; and, last but not least, of the delightful Arabian tale of
Prince Ahmed and the Peri Banou? On his westward journey, Odysseus is
ensnared and kept in temporary bondage by the amorous nymph of darkness,
Kalypso (kalnptw, to veil or cover). So the zone of the moon-goddess
Aphrodite inveigles all-seeing Zeus to treacherous slumber on Mount
Ida; and by a similar sorcery Tasso's great hero is lulled in unseemly
idleness in Armida's golden paradise, at the western verge of the world.
The disappearance of Tannhauser behind the moonlit cliff, lured by Venus
Ursula, the pale goddess of night, is a precisely parallel circumstance.

But solar and lunar phenomena are by no means the only sources of
popular mythology. Opposite my writing-table hangs a quaint German
picture, illustrating Goethe's ballad of the Erlking, in which the whole
wild pathos of the story is compressed into one supreme moment; we see
the fearful, half-gliding rush of the Erlking, his long, spectral arms
outstretched to grasp the child, the frantic gallop of the horse, the
alarmed father clasping his darling to his bosom in convulsive embrace,
the siren-like elves hovering overhead, to lure the little soul with
their weird harps. There can be no better illustration than is furnished
by this terrible scene of the magic power of mythology to invest the
simplest physical phenomena with the most intense human interest; for
the true significance of the whole picture is contained in the father's
address to his child,

"Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind;
In durren Blattern sauselt der Wind."

The story of the Piper of Hamelin, well known in the version of Robert
Browning, leads to the same conclusion. In 1284 the good people of
Hamelin could obtain no rest, night or day, by reason of the direful
host of rats which infested their town. One day came a strange man in a
bunting-suit, and offered for five hundred guilders to rid the town of
the vermin. The people agreed: whereupon t