In the first account we stand before the first beginnings of sober reflection about nature, in the second we are on the ground of marvel and myth.  Where reflection found its materials we do not think of asking; ordinary contemplation of things could furnish it.  But the materials for myth could not be derived from contemplation, at least so far as regards the view of nature which is chiefly before us here; they came from the many-coloured traditions of the old world of Western Asia.  Here we are in the enchanted garden of the ideas of genuine antiquity; the fresh early smell of earth meets us on the breeze.  The Hebrews breathed the air which surrounded them; the stories they told on the Jordan, of the land of Eden and the fall, were told in the same way on the Euphrates and the Tigris, on the Oxus and the Arius.  The true land of the world, where dwells the Deity, is Eden.  It was not removed from the earth after the fall; it is there still, else whence the need of cherubs to guard the access to it?  The rivers that proceed from it are real rivers, all well known to the narrator, they and the countries they flow through and the products that come from these countries.  Three of them, the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Tigris, are well known to us also; and if we only knew how the narrator conceived their courses to lie, it would be easy to determine the position of their common source and the situation of Paradise.  Other peoples of antiquity define the situation of their holy land in a similar manner; the streams have different names, but the thing is the same.  The wonderful trees also in the garden of Eden have many analogies even in the Germanic mythology.  The belief in the cherubs which guard Paradise is also widely diffused. Krub is perhaps the same name, and certainly represents the same idea, as Gryp in Greek, and Greif in German.  We find everywhere these beings wonderfully compounded out of lion, eagle, and man.  They are everywhere guardians of the divine and sacred, and then also of gold and of treasures.  The ingredients of the story seem certainly to have parted with some of their original colour under the influence of monotheism.  The Hebrew people no doubt had something more to tell about the tree of life than now appears.  It is said to have been in the midst of the garden, and so it seems to have stood at the point whence the four streams issued, at the fountain of life, which was so important to the faith of the East, and which Alexander marched out to discover.  Paradise, moreover, was certainly not planted originally for man, it was the dwelling of the Deity Himself.  Traces of this may still be recognised.  Jehovah does not descend to it from heaven, but goes out walking in the garden in the evening as if He were at home.  The garden of Deity is, however, on the whole somewhat naturalised.  A similar weakening down of the mythic element is apparent in the matter of the serpent; it is not seen at once that the serpent is a demon.  Yet parting with these foreign elements has made the story no poorer, and it has gained in noble simplicity.  The mythic background gives it a tremulous brightness:  we feel that we are in the golden age when heaven was still on earth; and yet unintelligible enchantment is avoided, and the limit of a sober chiaroscuro is not transgressed.