Walter William Strickland

“ For that was the gigantic delusion to which he sacrificed his life. If it were not so tragical, we, with our present knowledge of the vastness of the universe and our own insignificance, should be inclined to smile at the ludicrous want of a sense of proportion between the means and the end that such an idea displayed, and no doubt no Greek philosopher or even Greek lyric poet, with their instinctive sense of proportion and harmony, could ever have been betrayed into so glaring and fatal an error ”

“ In the Venetian variant a trace of the bean stalk remains in the dish of scarlet runners, and as the scarlet runner is a symbol-of the moon, this proves that the castle of the wind and the castle of lead really do, as was before inferred, represent the dark moon. The dumplings of the Slovenian legend have been transformed, the lead ones into a chestnut, the silver ones into a walnut, and the gold ones into an apple, the invariable high latitude symbol of the sun. ”

“ But when, after centuries of pious fraud, it gradually began to dawn upon even the stupidest believer, after centuries of practical experience, that no amount of bottling even the purest faith in the most suitable human organism, would transform even the most ascetic of saints into blasting-powder and dynamite, religious arrogance, to preserve itself, suffered a gradual transformation. ”

“ On the eve of this marriage a beautiful youth passes the door of the baker’s daughter, and says: “The idea of a beautiful girl like you to go and marry a raven. It will sit on your shoulder and dirty you.” ”

“ Oh! the pity of it, that so genial, well-meaning and poetical an intelligence, bent upon benefiting the world at large, and sacrificing itself for the good of mankind, should in reality have sacrificed itself to so gigantic a delusion ”

“ Now the primitive annual solar fairy story’s period may be compared to a ribbon a little more than sixty-one inches in length, this length being constant to represent the one year, three months, one week, and a few days deduced roughly from Father Know-All, and confirmed by the Venetian variant of the end of the Three Citrons—L’omo morto (the dead man) —and we must imagine this ribbon pinned down for just six inches to represent the definite six weeks’ period of the Arctic winter night which gave rise to the myth. ”

“ As we shall see, the cat jumps into a spider’s web, her tail hangs down, and the dog Jumps at the tail, the wife at the dog, the husband at the wife, and they are all hung up together. Now this is George and His Goat over again: the goat is the old woman of the Tre narance, she is the old woman of the Three Citrons, who corresponds to the Norns of Father Know-All, the third of whom is found by the hero, spiderlike, spinning in a corner of the deserted castle of gold. ”

“ The idea, like all ill weeds, grew apace, and soon it was the whole creation—just imagine it!—from the earth-centre to the farthest limits of the Milky Way, that was groaning and travailing in pain together, and which man’s regeneration was somehow to set to rights. ”

“ When the apple is opened, and the queen is bribed by the beautiful dress to concede a third night to the heroine, the king throws the possetted wine, unseen by the queen, under the table, and when the heroine sleeps with him the whole mystery is explained. ”

“ These allegories and mysteries must have been widely diffused in the time of Christ himself, and it is more than likely that a person who proposed to himself the task of solving all human difficulties and pointing out the narrow gate which leadeth unto life, had turned his receptive mind to the study of popular beliefs, and had somehow or other got to know of the great mystery of Arctic regions, the death and burial of the sun, together with and in consequence of the temporary death of vegetable and animal life, and their resurrection together with the sun in spring. ”

“ Much the same events occur as in the Three Citrons, but she meets no flocks of ravens. The first castle is the castle of the wind, and the old woman gives her a chestnut, and bids her only open it in case of extreme need. The wind is prevented from eating the heroine by being well fed up and gorged with a plate of ‘pasta’ and haricot beans, and sends her on to the castle of the moon. ”

“ In most people the range of sight differs more or less in the right and left eye, and where this is very much the case, it is often impossible to judge at a moment’s notice whether an object flying be a gnat near at hand or a bird a long way off. Christ, like Waterton, very probably picked up the art of seeing fish deep down in the water from some savage fisherman, and then perfected himself by practice in his rambles about the Lake of Galilee. ”

“ In fishing with the grasshopper or spinning the minnow for large trout in the Oglio of Val Camonica, the success of the fisherman depends in great part upon his power of seeing the fish in the water as it follows the bait. ”