All the interest now
turns on the development of its points of moral or sentimental
significance; the love of the immortal for the mortal, the
presumption of the daughter of man who desires to see the divine form
as it is; on the fact that not without loss of sight, or life itself,
can man look upon it. The travail of nature has been transformed
into the pangs of the human mother; and the poet dwells much on the
pathetic incident of death in childbirth, making [25] Dionysus, as
Callimachus calls him, a seven months' child, cast out among its
enemies, motherless. And as a consequence of this human interest,
the legend attaches itself, as in an actual history, to definite
sacred objects and places, the venerable relic of the wooden image
which fell into the chamber of Semele with the lightning-flash, and
which the piety of a later age covered with plates of brass; the Ivy-
Fountain near Thebes, the water of which was so wonderfully bright
and sweet to drink, where the nymphs bathed the new-born child; the
grave of Semele, in a sacred enclosure grown with ancient vines,
where some volcanic heat or flame was perhaps actually traceable,
near the lightning-struck ruins of her supposed abode.
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