It is to such ecstasies, however, that
all nature-worship seems to tend; that giddy, intoxicating sense of
spring--that tingling in the veins, sympathetic with the yearning
life of the earth, having, apparently, in all times and places,
prompted some mode of wild dancing. Coleridge, in one of his
fantastic speculations, refining on the German word for enthusiasm--
Schwarmerei, swarming, as he says, "like the swarming of bees
together"--has explained how the sympathies of mere numbers, as such,
the random catching on [57] fire of one here and another there, when
people are collected together, generates as if by mere contact, some
new and rapturous spirit, not traceable in the individual units of a
multitude. Such swarming was the essence of that strange dance of
the Bacchic women: literally like winged things, they follow, with
motives, we may suppose, never quite made clear even to themselves,
their new, strange, romantic god. Himself a woman-like god,--it was
on women and feminine souls that his power mainly fell. At Elis, it
was the women who had their own little song with which at spring-time
they professed to call him from the sea: at Brasiae they had their
own temple where none but women might enter; and so the Thiasus,
also, is almost exclusively formed of women--of those who experience
most directly the influence of things which touch thought through the
senses--the presence of night, the expectation of morning, the
nearness of wild, unsophisticated, natural things--the echoes, the
coolness, the noise of frightened creatures as they climbed through
the darkness, the sunrise seen from the hill-tops, the disillusion,
the bitterness of satiety, the deep slumber which comes with the
morning.
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