passing
of the god.

But Pan, of course, could only die with the earth itself, and so long as
the lichen and the moss keep quietly at their work on the grey boulder,
and the lightning zigzags down through the hemlocks, and the arrowhead
guards its waxen blossom in the streams; so long as the earth shakes
with the thunder of hoofs, or pours out its heart in the song of the
veery-thrush, or bares its bosom in the wild rose, so long will there be
little chapels to Pan in the woodland--chapels on the lintels of which
you shall read, as Virgil wrote: _Happy is he who knows the rural gods,
Pan, and old Sylvanus, and the sister nymphs_.

It is strange to see how in every country, but more particularly in
America and in England, the modern man is finding his religion as it was
found by those first worshippers of the beautiful mystery of the visible
universe, those who first caught glimpses of

Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain,
Gods on the craggy height and roaring sea.

First thoughts are proverbially the best; at all events, they are the
bravest. And man's first thoughts of the world and the strangely
romantic life he is suddenly called up, out of nothingness, to live,
unconsulted, uninstructed, left to feel his way in the blinding
radiance up into which he has been mysteriously thrust; those first
thoughts of his are nowadays being corroborated in every direction by
the last thoughts of the latest thinker. Mr. Jack London, one of
Nature's own writers, one of those writers too, through whom the Future
speaks, has given a name to this stirring of the human soul--"The Call
of the Wild." Following his lead, others have written of "The Lure," of
this and that in nature, and all mean the same thing: that the salvation
of man is to be found on, and by means of, the green earth out of which
he was born, and that, as there is no ill of his body which may not be
healed by the magic juices of herb and flower, or the stern potency of
minerals, so there is no sickness of his soul that may not be cured by
the sound of the sea, the rustle of leaves, or the songs of birds.

Thirty or forty years ago the soul of the world was very sick. It had
lost religion in a night of misunderstood "materialism," so-called. But
since then that mere "matter" which seemed to eclipse the soul has grown
strangely radiant to deep-seeing eyes, and, whereas then one had to
doubt everything, dupes of superficial disillusionmen