Some French writer that I read when I was a boy, said that the desert went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them what they are. I ot remember by what argument he proved them to be evehe iructible children of earth, but it may well be that the elements have their children. If we khe Fire Worshippers better we might find that their turies of pious observance have been rewarded, and that the fire has given them a little of its nature; and I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Images form themselves in our minds perpetually as if they were reflected in some pool. We gave ourselves up in old times to mythology, and saw the Gods everywhere. We talked to them face to face, and the stories of that union are so many that I think they outnumber all the like stories of all the rest of Europe. Even to-day our try people speak with the dead and with some who perhaps have never died as we uah; and even our educated people pass without great difficulty into the dition of quiet that is the dition of vision. We make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. Did not the wise Porphyry think that all souls e to be born because of water, and that 「even the geion of images in the mind is from water」?
1902.