ive. Forgotten poets may, in the first instance,
have been responsible for the particular forms they took, their names
and stories, yet even so they but clothed with legend presences of wood
and water, of earth and sea and sky, which man dimly felt to have a
real existence; and these presences, forgotten or banished for a while
in prosaic periods, or under Puritanic repression, are once more being
felt as spiritual realities by a world coming more and more to evoke its
divinities by individual meditation on, and responsiveness to, the
mysterious so-called natural influences by which it feels itself
surrounded. Thus the first religion of the world seems likely to be its
last. In other words, the modern tendency, with spiritually sensitive
folk, is for us to go direct to the fountain-head of all theologies,
Nature herself, and, prostrating ourselves before her mystery, strive to
interpret it according to our individual "intimations," listening,
attent, for ourselves to her oracles, and making, to use the phrase of
one of the profoundest of modern Nature-seers, our own "reading of
earth." Such was Wordsworth's initiative, and, as some one has said, "we
are all Wordsworthians today." That pagan creed, in which Wordsworth
passionately wished himself suckled, is not "outworn." He himself, in
his own austere way, has, more than any one man, verified it for us, so
that indeed we do once more nowadays

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Nor have the dryads and the fauns been frighted away for good. All over
the world they are trooping back to the woods, and whoso has eyes may
catch sight, any summer day, of "the breast of the nymph in the brake."
Imagery, of course; but imagery that is coming to have a profounder
meaning, and a still greater expressive value, than it ever had for
Greece and Rome. All myths that are something more than fancies gain
rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of
human experience. The mysteries of Eleusis would mean more for a modern
man than for an ancient Greek, and in our modern groves of Dodona the
voice of the god has meanings for us stranger than ever reached his
ears. Maybe the meanings have a purport less definite, but they have at
least the suggestiveness of a nobler mystery. But surely the Greeks were
right, and we do but follow them as we listen to the murmur of the wind
in the lofty oaks, convi