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On another were a hundred sorts of drinking glasses, cups, cisterns, ewers, false cups, tumblers, bowls, mazers, mugs, jugs, goblets, talboys, and such other Bacchic artillery. On the frontispiece of the triumphal arch, under the zoophore, was the following couplet: You who presume to move this way, Get a good lantern, lest you stray.
In her face and manner was that inexplicable motherliness which some girls have even while nursing their dolls some never; ay, though they may boast of a houseful of children never! Master Oliver guessed this by instinct, as children always do. He looked at her intently, a queer, mischievous, yet penetrating look; then broke into a broad, genial laugh, quite Bacchic and succumbed.
No student of classic literature will need any demonstration of the probability that the Maenads in their Bacchic invocation danced; and here we have in all likelihood the origin of that fashion of concluding operas with a chorus and a dance which survived as late as Mozart's "Die Zauberflöte." The Solos of the "Orfeo"
And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers, when they are under the influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in their right mind.
They were sunk, and the dark shadows that encircled them were a shock to his artistic eye. These were the eyes of a girl who had raved like a maenad the night through. Had she not slept in her quiet little room; had she been rushing with Alexander in the wild Bacchic rout; or had something dreadful happened to his son?
They therefore determined to initiate him at the Bacchic orgy, for he was of a brave temper, and they knew that he would not submit to the rites, and so would be torn to pieces by the Mænads, and they might escape the law in their fraud.
"In the Orphic and Bacchic sects, in the Eleusinian and Samothracian Mysteries, was thus treasured up the secret doctrine of the old theological and philosophical myths, which had once constituted the primitive legendary stock of Greece in the hands of the original priesthood and in the ages anterior to Homer.
If wine be evil, song is evil too. His Bacchic Ode is full of the same enthusiasm. Bacchus received his highest honors at the end of the last century from the decadents in England. Poetry about the Mermaid Inn is bound to take this tone. This aspect is especially stressed by Alfred Noyes, who imagines himself carried back across the centuries to become the Ganymede of the great poets.
The priest of Dionysus must have felt himself only a dancing, shouting thing, one with the world without, "whirled round in earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees." And how perfectly the ancient belief fits our psychophysical analysis! The Bacchic enthusiast believed himself possessed with the very ecstasy of the spirit of nature.
J. Yes, but not like the earth, this low-minded creature's chosen dwelling. M. The earth is spirit made fruitful, life. And its heart-beats are told in gold and wine. J. Oh! it is shocking to hear such sentiments in these times. I thought that Bacchic energy of yours was long since repressed. M. No!
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