In the region of mythology the data have been collected and collated with considerable thoroughness, especially by German savans; in the region of poetic annals, only the general details have been subjected to analytic scrutiny; and in that of household lore and legend, saving the collection of the Brothers Grimm, little has been effected in comparison with the importance of the subject. Enough has been done, however, to demonstrate, not only the applicability of the fore-made classification, but also the singular analogical resemblance in minute details which exists between the household legends of any one people as compared with those of any other, and which, in analogy at least, points to the original historical unity of the human race.
Nor is the analogy which bespeaks this unity to be limited to the general analysis of class. Amid the vagaries of mythology and apotheosis, amid the epic-annals of heroes and demi-gods, and, in short, amid the more minute imaginings and superstitions [{390}] of every people may be traced curious and often startlingly singular analogical resemblances.
The Edda, weird, Northern and Gothic in the ensemble of its imaginings, reproduces, otherwise nomenclated, the mythology of the Greek and of the Roman; the dim bat-winged Athor of mystical Egypt, who presided under the shadows of the pyramids over the creation of beauty, reappears, less mystically aureola'd, in the classical mythos of Venus; and the ghoul of the desert-inhabiting Saracen—most Arabic of all Arabs—haunts the woodlands and waste-places of Germany, as illusive and wine-dispensing Elle-maid; in short, in all forms of superstition and in all moods of anthology there is an essential unity—a unity having its root in the general unity of the human imagination. For, the imagination, however through the operation of local causes its dreams may be tipped with rainbow-tints or imbued with shadowy sublimity—is one in the ever-varying rhythm of its creations, and one in the vague palaces of fantasy which it uprears. Valleys and palaces of ideal loveliness it may evoke—visions to which Poe weds expression in the weird imagery of his Haunted Palace:
"And travellers in that happy valley,
Through two luminous windows, saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well-tunéd law;"
Or, again, valleys and palaces of lunatic ghastliness and superstition—visionary lunacies, which Poe graphically, though somewhat metaphorically, depicts in his own modification of the above rhythm-painting:
"And travellers now within that valley.
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody."
But, whether the music be discordant or well-tuned, the humanity of its note cannot be mistaken; and whether the creations of the human intellect be palaces of loveliness or pagodas of ghastliness, they still bear the unmistakable impress of man's toiling after the ideal—of the vague, restless, and unsatisfied yearning for the lost ideal of his being, to compass which he toils and struggles and dreams. In this essential unity of human imagination is grounded the essential unity of the data of anthology, and hence its marvellous and minute analogical resemblances.
Anthology having never been reduced to definitive system, it happens that no little of its critical material exists only in lumbering and uncollated masses. Indeed, not a little of that which might have been valuable as material has been permitted to rot in mildewed manuscript—for need of appreciation of its real value on the part of scholars—instead of having been (as it should have been) treasured and preserved, as the pabulum of thought and science; and yet more remains uncollected, and will so remain until a more valid comprehension of its value shall have been impressed upon the minds of spectacled professors who are usually the last to comprehend that in the comprehension of which they ought to be first. But, notwithstanding this apparent apathy and neglect on the part of the learned, there are, still, certain problems of history which can only be unriddled with this key—that of comparative anthology—as, for instance, the exploits of Joan d'Arc; a hundred riddles of mental philosophy there are, which can not be unravelled without it; and, in every language, multitudes of words are based, as to their peculiar shades of significance, upon anthological criticism. Thus the nightmare is the demon which haunts the night; the Huguenots were imps of the woods—from Hugon, the demon of the woodlands;—and not not as a learned dean supposes the people eidgenossen; and a seer is simply a see-er, that is, one who has the gift of the second sight.
A minute knowledge of anthology—we here use the term to denote that blossoming of events and moral ideas into imaginative forms, which constitutes most of that which we denominate the poetic material of a people, is, therefore, in the highest degree necessary to the proper comprehension of—