eat Artist; if
they had at all understood the marvellous Unity of the Divine Works, it
would have been worse than idle in them to have invented a language
which thus lowered nature, robbing it of its solemn majesty, its august
dignity. As all these divinities had the human figure, God was banished
from His own universe, man everywhere substituting his own personality.
Speaking of the great dearth of vivid descriptions of natural scenery
among the ancients, Chateaubriand says: 'It must not be supposed that
men as full of sensibility as the ancients wanted eyes to see nature, or
talent to depict it, if some powerful cause had not blinded and misled
them; this cause was their mythology, which, peopling the universe with
graceful phantoms, robbed creation of its solemnity, of its sublime
repose. Christianity came--and fauns, satyrs, and wanton nymphs
disappeared; the grottos regained their holy silence; the dim woods
their mystic reveries; the vast forests their vague and sublime
melancholy; the streams overturned their petty urns to drink only from
the mountain tops, to pour forth only the waters of the abyss. The true
and One God, in reappearing in His own mystical works, again breathed
through the voice of nature the secret thrill of His perfect Unity, His
incomprehensible Infinity.'

'Earth outgrows the mythic fancies
Sung beside her in her youth;
And those debonaire romances
Sound but dull beside the truth.
Phoebus' chariot race is run!
Look up, poets, to the Sun!
Pan, Pan is dead.

'Christ hath sent us down the angels;
And the whole earth and the skies
Are illumed by altar candles
Lit for blessed mysteries;
And a Priest's hand through creation
Waveth calm and consecration--
And Pan is dead.

'O brave Poets, keep back nothing;
Mix not falsehood with the whole!
Look up Godward! speak the truth in
Worthy song from earnest soul!
Hold, in high poetic duty,
Truest truth, the fairest Beauty!
Pan, Pan is dead.'

As we have already intimated, Pantheism is the negation of the Divine
Personality in order to arrive at Unity; Polytheism is the negation of
the Divine Unity, which is fractioned and divided that its multitudinous
action may be conceived. The light fancy was delighted with such
divisions, resulting in varied gods and goddesses; but the soul could
f