er are the mythologic ages and the
nineteenth century! The critical and scientific spirit of the one is in
strange contrast with the credulous, blindly reverent spirit of the
other. Mythology delegated the government of the world to inferior
deities, the subjects of an omnipotent Fate or Necessity; while, to
show how extremes meet, mere science delegates it to chemical and
physiological agencies, and ends, like the mythic cosmogonies, in some
irrepressible spontaneous impulse of matter to develope itself in the
ever-changing forms of the visible universe. Myriads of gods were the
actors in "the rushing metamorphosis" of the old myth-haunted Nature;
while chemic and elemental forces perform the same parts in the
masquerade of the modern _Phasis_. Both mythology and science,
therefore, stick fast in secondary causes.

Myths are the religion of youth, and of primitive, unsophisticated
nations; while science may be called the religion of the mature man,
full of experience and immersed in the actual. The Positivism of Comte,
like the old myth-worship, sets up for its deity human nature
idealized, adorned with genius and virtue. The Positivist worships
virtuous human nature, conditioned and limited as it is; while the
Mythist worshipped it reflected on the outer world and endowed with
supernatural attributes, clothed with mist-caps and wishing-caps that
gave it dominion over space and time. The restless, glittering,
whimsical sprites of fairy mythology, that were believed of old to have
so large a share in shaping the course of Nature and of human life,
have vanished from the precincts of the schoolmaster at least. They
could not endure the clear eyebeam of Science, which has searched their
subterranean abodes, withering them up and metamorphosing them into
mere physiological forces. Reason and scientific investigation have no
patience with the things of faith and imagination. Our poets now have
to go back to the Past, to the standpoints of the old pagan bards.
Tennyson lives in the land of the Lotophagi, in the Arabian Nights of
the Bagdad of Caliph Haroun, and in the orchard lawns of King Arthur's
Avalon. So, too, Longfellow must inhale the golden legendary air of the
Past. The mere humanitarian bards, who try to make modern life trip to
the music of trochees, dactyles, and spondees, fail miserably.
Industrialism is not poetical. Our modern life expresses itself in
machines, in mathematical formulas, in statistics and with