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Doubtless after the first or second repetition of a myth, which some seer of a tribe chants in rude verse, the primitive listener is confused between fact and fancy. The non-essential incidents which the narrator adds from sheer love of making up a story are not distinguished from the incidents that really express the working of natural forces. So it happens that, in the time between the first starting up of the account and the analysis and explanation of it by some philosopher, a narrative handed down from father to son is believed in, word for word, as religious truth, though gaining details and losing its original meaning as it goes. As some one has said, it was because the Greeks had forgotten that Zeus meant the bright sky that they could talk of him as a king ruling a company of manlike deities on Mount Olympus.

There are many beautiful myths existing to-day in prose and poetry. In the tribal species, there is the great mass of Greek and Roman early religious stories and there are the Oriental and the Norse cycles. In the artificial group there are the later Greek and Roman myths like those devised by Plato and Plutarch, and there are our more modern beautiful creations with myth elements like Milton's "Comus" and many of the poems of Keats, where not only the incidents are newly made but the deities also. In prose we have the delightful "Wonder Book," which Hawthorne prepared for children. We have become so familiar with "Paradise Lost" that we hardly realize that it is essentially myth—a great seer's expression of the anthropomorphism of his people. Like a true bard of old, Milton added much also to his people's thinking on the universe. How much he added we see fully only when we deliberately compare the extension and concreteness of his account with the meagerness of the Hebrew Scriptures.