have described,
an attempt to explain phenomena otherwise inexplicable. But it is
much more: it is the effect on the imagination of certain external
impressions, it is those impressions brought to a focus, personified,
but personified vaguely, in a fluctuating ever-changing manner; the
personification being continually altered, reinforced, blurred out,
enlarged, restricted by new series of impressions from without, even as
the shape which we puzzle out of congregated cloud-masses fluctuates
with their every movement--a shifting vapour now obliterates the form,
now compresses it into greater distinctness: the wings of the fantastic
monster seem now flapping leisurely, now extending bristling like a
griffon's; at one moment it has a beak and talons, at others a mane
and hoofs; the breeze, the sunlight, the moonbeam, form, alter, and
obliterate it. Thus is it with the supernatural: the gods, moulded out
of cloud and sunlight and darkness, are for ever changing, fluctuating
between a human or animal shape, god or goddess, cow, ape, or horse, and
the mere natural phenomenon which impresses the fancy. Pan is the weird,
shaggy, cloven-footed shape which the goat-herd or the huntsman has seen
gliding among the bushes in the grey twilight; his is the piping heard
in the tangle of reeds, marsh lily, and knotted nightshade by the river
side: but Pan is also the wood, with all its sights and noises, the
solitude, the gloom, the infinity of rustling leaves, and cracking
branches; he is the greenish-yellow light stealing in amid the boughs;
he is the breeze in the foliage, the murmur of unseen waters, the mist
hanging over the damp sward, the ferns and grasses which entangle the
feet, and the briars which catch in the hair and garments are his grasp;
and the wanderer dashes through the thickets with a sickening fear in
his heart, and sinks down on the outskirts of the forest, gasping, with
sweat-clotted hair, overcome by this glimpse of the great god.

In this constant renewal of the impressions on the fancy, in this
unceasing shaping and reshaping of its creations, consisted the vitality
of the myths of paganism, from the scorching and pestilence-bearing gods
of India to the divinities shaped out of tempest and snowdrift of
Scandinavia; they were constantly issuing out of the elements, renewed,
changed, ever young, under the exorcism not only of the priest and of
the poet, but of the village boor; and on this unceasing renovation
d