Melampus had taught to mix always their wine with water, and with
whom the watering of the vines became a religious ceremony; the very
dead, as they thought, drinking of and refreshed by the stream. And
who that has ever felt the heat of a southern country does not know
this poetry, the motive of the loveliest of all the works attributed
to Giorgione, the Fete Champetre in the Louvre; the intense
sensations, the subtle and far-reaching symbolisms, which, in these
places, cling about the touch and sound and sight of it? Think of
the darkness of the well in the breathless court, with the delicate
ring of ferns kept alive just within the opening; of the sound of the
fresh water flowing through the wooden pipes into the houses of
Venice, on summer mornings; of the cry Acqua fresca! at Padua or
Verona, when the people run to buy what they prize, in its rare
purity, more than wine, bringing pleasures so full of exquisite
appeal to the imagination, that, in these streets, the very beggars,
one thinks, might exhaust all the philosophy of the epicurean.

Out of all these fancies comes the vine-growers' god, the spiritual
form of fire and dew. Beyond the famous representations of Dionysus
in later art and poetry--the Bacchanals of Euripides, the statuary of
the school of Praxiteles--a multitude of literary allusions and local
[29] customs carry us back to this world of vision unchecked by
positive knowledge, in which the myth is begotten among a primitive
people, as they wondered over the life of the thing their hands
helped forward, till it became for them a kind of spirit, and their
culture of it a kind of worship. Dionysus, as we see him in art and
poetry, is the projected expression of the ways and dreams of this
primitive people, brooded over and harmonised by the energetic Greek
imagination; the religious imagination of the Greeks being,
precisely, a unifying or identifying power, bringing together things