thout supplying any new ones. The Roman ploughman must have
missed the fauns whom he had been accustomed to expect in the thicket at
the end of his furrow, when the new faith told him that these were
nothing but rustling leaves. When the swish of unseen garments beside
the old nymph-haunted fountain was silenced, his heart was left lonely
and his imagination impoverished. Much charm and romance vanished from
his early world with the passing of its pagan creatures, and indeed it
is to this cause that we must trace the extraordinarily far-reaching and
varied crop of miraculous legends of all sorts which sprang up in early
Catholic times. These were the protest of unconscious idealism against
the bare world from which its sweet presences had vanished.

"In th' olde dayes of the King Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye.
The elf-queen, with hir joly companye,
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede;
This was the olde opinion, as I rede.
But now can no man see none elves mo.
For now the grete charitee and prayeres
Of limitours and othere holy freres,

* * * * *

This maketh that there been no fayeryes.
For ther as wont to walken was an elf,
Ther walketh now the limitour himself."

Against this impoverishment the human revolt was inevitable, and it
explains the spirit in such writers as Shelley and Goethe. Children of
nature, who love the sun and the grass, and are at home upon the earth,
their spirits cry for something to delight and satisfy them, nearer than
speculations of theology or cold pictures of heaven. Wordsworth, in his
famous lines, has expressed the protest in the familiar words:--

"Great God, I'd rather be
A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

The early classic thought which found its most perfect expression in the
mythology of Greece was not originally or essentially pagan. It was
humanistic, and represented the response of man's spirit to that free
and beautiful spirit which he found in nature around him. All such
symbolism of Greek religion as that of the worship of Dionysus and
Ceres, shows this. In these cults the commonest things of life, t