enote: Natural suggestions soon exhausted.]

[Sidenote: They will be carried out in abstract fancy.]

When we transport ourselves in fancy to patriarchal epochs and Arcadian
scenes, we can well feel the inevitable tendency of the mind to
mythologise and give its myths a more and more dramatic character. The
phenomena of nature, unintelligible rationally but immensely impressive,
must somehow be described and digested. But while they compel attention
they do not, after a while, enlarge experience. Husbandmen's lore is
profound, practical, poetic, superstitious, but it is singularly
stagnant. The cycle of natural changes goes its perpetual round and the
ploughman's mind, caught in that narrow vortex, plods and plods after
the seasons. Apart from an occasional flood, drought, or pestilence,
nothing breaks his laborious torpor. The most cursory inspection of
field and sky yields him information enough for his needs. Practical
knowledge with him is all instinct and tradition. His mythology can for
that very reason ride on nature with a looser rein. If at the same time,
however, his circumstances are auspicious and he feels practically
secure, he will have much leisure to ripen inwardly and to think. He
hasten to unfold in meditation the abstract potentialities of his mind.
His social and ideal passions, his aptitude for art and fancy, will
arouse within him a far keener and more varied experience than his outer
life can supply. Yet all his fortunes continue to be determined by
external circumstances and to have for their theatre this given and
uncontrollable world. Some conception of nature and the gods--that is,
in his case, some mythology--must therefore remain before him always and
stand in his mind for the real forces controlling experience.

His moral powers and interests have meantime notably developed. His
sense for social relations has grown clear and full in proportion as his
observation of nature has sunk into dull routine. Consequently, the
myths by which reality is represented lose, so to speak, their
birthright and first nationality. They pass under the empire of abstract
cogitation and spontaneous fancy. They become naturalised in the mind.
The poet cuts loose from nature and works out instead whatever hints of
human character or romantic story the myth already supplies. Analogies
drawn from moral and passionate experience replace the further
portraiture of outer facts. Human tastes, habits, and dreams enter t