Year by
year in his own beautiful land he beheld, with natural regret, the
bright pomp of summer fading into the gloom and stagnation of
winter, and year by year he hailed with natural delight the outburst
of fresh life in spring. Accustomed to personify the forces of
nature, to tinge her cold abstractions with the warm hues of
imagination, to clothe her naked realities with the gorgeous drapery
of a mythic fancy, he fashioned for himself a train of gods and
goddesses, of spirits and elves, out of the shifting panorama of the
seasons, and followed the annual fluctuations of their fortunes with
alternate emotions of cheerfulness and dejection, of gladness and
sorrow, which found their natural expression in alternate rites of
rejoicing and lamentation, of revelry and mourning. A consideration
of some of the Greek divinities who thus died and rose again from
the dead may furnish us with a series of companion pictures to set
side by side with the sad figures of Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. We
begin with Dionysus.
The god Dionysus or Bacchus is best known to us as a personification
of the vine and of the exhilaration produced by the juice of the
grape.
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