A Book of Myths (Illustrated in Color)

This book is intended for those who care to read stories, through which runs the same humanity that their own hearts know. For although the old worship has passed away, it is almost impossible for us to open a book that does not contain some mention of the gods of long ago. In our childhood we are given copies of Kingsley's Heroes and of Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales. Later on, we find in Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Keats, Shelley, Longfellow, Tennyson, Elizabeth Browning, and a host of other writers, constant allusion to the stories of the gods.

Scarcely a poet has ever written but makes mention of them in one or other of his poems. It would seem as if there were no get-away from them. We might expect in this twentieth century that the old gods of Greece and of Rome, the gods of our Northern forefathers, the gods of Egypt, the gods of the British race, might be forgotten. But even when we read in a newspaper of airplanes, someone is more than likely to quote the story of Bellerophon and his winged steed, or of Icarus, the flyer, and in our daily speech the names of gods and goddesses continually crop up. The silvery substance in our thermometers and barometers is named Mercury. Blacksmiths are accustomed to being referred to as "sons of Vulcan," and beautiful youths to being called "young Adonises". We accept the names of newspapers and debating societies as being the "Argus," without perhaps quite realising who was Argus, the many-eyed. We talk of "a panic" and forget that the great god Pan is father of the word. Even in our religious services we go back to heathenism. Not only are the crockets on our cathedral spires and church pews remnants of fire-worship, but one of our own most beautiful Christian blessings is probably of Assyrian origin: "The Lord bless thee and keep thee . . . The Lord make His face to shine upon thee .... The Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon thee . . ." So did the priests of the sun-gods invoke blessings upon those who worshipped.

We make many discoveries as we study the myths of the North and of the South. In the story of Baldur we find that the goddess Hel ultimately gave her name to the place of punishment precious to the Calvinistic mind. And because the Norseman very much disliked the bitter, cruel cold of the long winter, his heaven was a warm, well-fired abode, and his place of punishment one of terrible frigidity. Somewhere on the other side of the Tweed and Cheviots was the spot selected by the Celt of southern Britain; on the other hand, the eastern mind, which knew the terrors of a sun-smitten land and of a heat that was torture, had for a hell a fiery place of constantly burning flames.