y, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for
our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life,
and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made
our souls less sensitive. Our souls that were once naked to the winds of
heaven are now thickly clad, and have learned to build a house and light a
fire upon its hearth, and shut to the doors and windows. The winds can,
indeed, make us draw near to the fire, or can even lift the carpet and
whistle under the door, but they could do worse out on the plains long
ago. A certain learned man, quoted by Mr. Lang in his _Making of
Religion_, contends that the memories of primitive man and his thoughts of
distant places must have had the intensity of hallucination, because there
was nothing in his mind to draw his attention away from them--an
explanation that does not seem to me complete--and Mr. Lang goes on to
quote certain travellers to prove that savages live always on the edges of
vision. One Laplander who wished to become a Christian, and thought
visions but heathenish, confessed to a traveller, to whom he had given a
minute account of many distant events, read doubtless in that traveller's
mind, 'that he knew not how to make use of his eyes, since things
altogether distant were present to them.' I myself could find in one
district in Galway but one man who had not seen what I can but call
spirits, and he was in his dotage. 'There is no man mowing a meadow but
sees them at one time or another,' said a man in a different district.

If I can unintentionally cast a glamour, an enchantment, over persons of
our own time who have lived for years in great cities, there is no reason
to doubt that men could cast intentionally a far stronger enchantment, a
far stronger glamour, over the more sensitive people of ancient times, or
that men can still do so where the old order of life remains unbroken. Why
should not the Scholar Gipsy cast his spell over his friends? Why should
not St. Patrick, or he of whom the story was first told, pass his enemies,
he and all his clerics, as a herd of deer? Why should not enchanters like
him in the _Morte d'Arthur_ make troops of horse seem but grey stones? Why
should not the Roman soldiers, though they came of a civilization which
was ceasing to be sensitive to these things, have trembled for a moment
before the enchantments of the Druids of Mona? Why should not the Jesuit
father, or the Count S