That which forms the bone and muscle of a man this year may be upon his own table in the shape of potatoes or peaches one summer later. When Hamlet talked of turning the clay of Alexander into the bung of a beer-barrel, he spoke the simple truth. In that great play, Shakspeare appears to have had the transformations of material things much in his mind; for we find him alluding, in several passages, to the reciprocity which subsists between the elements of animate and inanimate things, and between the different members of the same kingdom;--as when, in conversation with the king about the dead Polonius, he makes Hamlet say, "A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat the fish that hath fed of the worm"; or where, over the grave of Ophelia, he traces the two ancient heroes back to their mother earth, in words some of which we have quoted.
The ancient mythology, which shadowed forth some truth in all its fables, turned these facts of Nature to its purpose. The gods of Greece, when they saw fit to remove a human being from life, sometimes reproduced him in another form of beauty, without any intermediate stages of decay. Apollo seemed to have a particular fancy for planting the boys and girls whom he had loved where he might enjoy their fragrant society. Thus, a boy named Cyparissus, who had the misfortune to kill a favorite deer, was so unwilling to be consoled, that he besought Apollo to make his mourning perpetual; and the kind god changed him into a cypress, which is still a funereal tree. The modest virgin Daphne, who succeeded in escaping the violence of his passion, was transformed into a laurel, which is ever green and pure. And the sweet youth Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo, being accidentally killed by a quoit which the god of day was throwing, that divinity, in his grief, caused those sweet flowers which bear his name to spring from his blood, where it fell upon the ground. It is only in the annihilation of the intervals of time between different forms of existence that these old metamorphoses, which Ovid relates, are fabulous. If our readers will bear us company a few steps, through ways which shall have diversions enough to forbid weariness, we will endeavor to satisfy them that these apparent fables are very near to every-day truths. We must begin with some plain statements.