Everybody knows dew.
It appears in the early morning, when the sun has barely risen. Dew covers grass and leaves with diaphanous silver droplets. Fragile enough, that a single sunbeam is enough to volatilize it. But so firmly hung to a blade of grass or a petal of flower. Pure as a diamond, and yet so fragile! The alchemists were not mistaken, when they made dew one of the main ingredients for the elaboration of the Philosophic Stone. Its transparency has to be collected in the early morning (but can one collect it differently?), unrolling a dry linen on grass and foliage to gather the droplets of dew. After soaking, the pure water is collected for the “Great Work”.

Dew has, it seems, others virtues. In the Ukraine, folk tradition claimed that women could enhance their beauty by soaking themselves in dew water. Others believed that dew could cure skin diseases. And many other positive attributes have been credited to dew.
Dew, the inspiration source of arts and letters, is also present in different religions. In the Bible, the Writings employ the word dew in the figurative sense, to indicate all things that without noise, and even in an invisible way, brings refreshment and blessing, like the dew for the vegetation…
In Ecclesiastes, the writer wants to remember only the transience associated with dew, and assimilates it with vanity and inanity of all things: literal significance of the famous words where Ecclesiastes deplore the void and nothingness of things:
” vanity of vanities, and all is vanity” – it is literally in Hebrew: “Dew, dew, and all is nothing but dew?”