The mother faints and is parched up by the heat
which brings the child to the birth; and it pierces through, a wonder
of freshness, drawing its everlasting green and typical coolness out
of the midst of the ashes; its own stem becoming at last like a
tangled mass of tortured metal. In thinking of Dionysus, then, as
fire-born, the Greeks apprehend and embody the sentiment, the poetry,
of all tender things which grow out of a hard soil, or in any sense
blossom before the leaf, like the little mezereon-plant of English
gardens, with its pale-purple, wine-scented flowers upon the leafless
twigs in February, or like the almond-trees of Tuscany, or Aaron's
rod that budded, or the staff in the hand of the Pope when
Tannhauser's repentance is accepted.
And his second birth is of the dew. The fire of which he was born
would destroy him in [27] his turn, as it withered up his mother; a
second danger comes; from this the plant is protected by the
influence of the cooling cloud, the lower part of his father the sky,
in which it is wrapped and hidden, and of which it is born again, its
second mother being, in some versions of the legend, Hye--the Dew.
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