All nations love the same jests and tales, Jews, Christians, and Mahometans, and the same translated suffice for all.  All men are children, and of one family.  The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.  Joseph Wolff, the missionary, distributed copies of Robinson Crusoe, translated into Arabic, among the Arabs, and they made a great sensation.  “Robinson Crusoe’s adventures and wisdom,” says he, “were read by Mahometans in the market-places of Sanaa, Hodyeda, and Loheya, and admired and believed!” On reading the book, the Arabians exclaimed, “O, that Robinson Crusoe must have been a great prophet!”

To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography.  So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted.  Either time or rare wisdom writes it.  Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.  The poet is he who can write some pure mythology to-day without the aid of posterity.  In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence for our classical dictionary,—­and then, perchance, have stuck up their names to shine in some corner of the firmament.  We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which itself is but materials to serve for a mythology.  How many volumes folio would the Life and Labors of Prometheus have filled, if perchance it had fallen, as perchance it did first, in days of cheap printing!  Who knows what shape the fable of Columbus will at length assume, to be confounded with that of Jason and the expedition of the Argonauts.  And Franklin,—­there may be a line for him in the future classical dictionary, recording what that demigod did, and referring him to some new genealogy.  “Son of——­and——.  He aided the Americans to gain their independence, instructed mankind in economy, and drew down lightning from the clouds.”

The hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and history, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made to express a variety of truths.  As if they were the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood they are for the time made to wear.  It is like striving to make the sun, or the wind, or the sea symbols to signify exclusively the particular thoughts of our day.  But what signifies it?  In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn.  In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays.  The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.