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.
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