that tremendous hand which memory has upon our heart-strings, a
poignant one. For they had lost their powers, but not their impulses.
It was a case of _si vieillesse pouvait_. I suppose they may have
appeared to some chance wayfarer, getting a glimpse of them at their
gambols between the poplar stems of the road, or in the vistas of the
hazel-brakes, as a company of sprightly matrons on a frolic. To the
Greeks foolishness! And be sure that such an observer would shrug them
out of mind. My own impression is that these ladies were perfectly
happy, that they had nothing of that _maggior' dolore_ which we
mortals know, and for which our joys have so often to pay. Let us hope
so at any rate, for about a fairy or a growing boy conscious of the
prison-shades could Poe have spun his horrors.

"To the Greeks foolishness," I said in my haste; but in very truth it
was far from being so. To the Greeks there was nothing extraordinary
in the parentage of a river or the love of a God for a mortal. Nor
should there be to a Christian who accepts the orthodox account of the
foundation of his faith. So far as we know, the generative process of
every created thing is the same; it is, therefore, an allowable
inference that the same process obtains with the created things which
are not sensible to ourselves. If flowers mate and beget as we do, why
not winds and waters, why not gods and nymphs, fauns and fairies? It
is the creative urgency that imports more than the creative matter. To
my mind, _magna componere parvis_, it is my fixed belief that all
created nature known to us is the issue of the mighty love of God for
his first-made creature the Earth. I accept the Greek mythology as the
nearest account of the truth we are likely to get. I have never had
the least difficulty in accepting it; and all I have since found out
of the relations of men with their fellow-creatures of other genera
confirms me in the belief that the urgency is the paramount necessity.

If I am to deal with a case of a mixed marriage, where the wife was a
fairy, the spirit of a tree, I shall ask leave to set down first a
plain proposition, which is that all Natural Facts (as wind, hills,
lakes, trees, animals, rain, rivers, flowers) have an underlying Idea
or Soul whereby they really are what they appear, to which they owe
the beauty, majesty, pity, terror, love, which they excite in us; and
that this Idea, or Soul, having a real existence of its own in
community with