6.  Now, therefore, in nearly every myth of importance, and certainly in every one of those which I shall speak to-night, you have to discern these three structural parts,—­the root and the two branches:  the root, in physical existence, sun, or sky, or cloud, or sea; then the personal incarnation of that, becoming a trusted and companionable deity, with whom you may walk hand in hand, as a child with its brother or its sister; and, lastly, the moral significance of the image, which is in all the great myths eternally and beneficently true.

7.  The great myths; that is to say, myths made by great people.  For the first plain fact about myth-making is one which has been most strangely lost sight of,—­that you cannot make a myth unless you have something to make it of.  You cannot tell a secret which you don’t know.  If the myth is about the sky, it must have been made by somebody who has looked at the sky.  If the myth is about justice and fortitude, it must have been made by someone who knew what it was to be just or patient.  According to the quantity of understanding in the person will be the quantity of significance in his fable; and the myth of a simple and ignorant race must necessarily mean little, because a simple and ignorant race have little to mean.  So the great question in reading a story is always, not what wild hunter dreamed, or what childish race first dreaded it; but what wise man first perfectly told, and what strong people first perfectly lived by it.  And the real meaning of any myth is that which it has at the noblest age of the nation among whom it is current.  The farther back you pierce, the less significance you will find, until you come to the first narrow thought, which, indeed, contains the germ of the accomplished tradition; but only as the seed contains the flower.  As the intelligence and passion of the race develop, they cling to and nourish their beloved and sacred legend; leaf by leaf it expands under the touch of more pure affections, and more delicate imagination, until at last the perfect fable burgeons out into symmetry of milky stem and honied bell.

8.  But through whatever changes it may pass, remember that our right reading of it is wholly dependent on the materials we have in our own minds for an intelligent answering sympathy.  If it first arose among a people who dwelt under stainless skies, and measures their journeys by ascending and declining stars, we certainly cannot read their story, if we have never seen anything above us in the day but smoke, nor anything around us in the night but candles.  If the tale goes on to change clouds or planets into living creatures,—­to invest them with fair forms and inflame them with mighty passions,—­we can only understand the story of the human-hearted things, in so far as we ourselves take pleasure in the perfectness of visible form, or can sympathize, by an effort of imagination, with the strange people who had other loves than those