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 scientific precision generally.  Art and poetry are pursued in the spirit of past ages, and concern themselves with the symbols, faiths, and ideal creations of the Past.

It is true, however, that all past ages of the world are contemporaneous in this age.  For example, we have in this nineteenth century the patriarchal age of the world still surviving in the desert tents of the Arab,—­while the mythic, anthropomorphic period is still extant in Persia, China, and India, and even among the nations of the West, in the rustic nooks and corners of the Roman Catholic countries of Europe.  But the existing nations, which still preserve that old ethnic worship and the mediaeval superstitions, are mere lingerers and camp-followers in the march of humankind.  Under the ample skirts of the Roman Church still cower and lurk the superstitions of the old ethnic world, baptized to be sure, and called by new names.  The Roman see has ever had a lingering kindness for the fair humanities of old religion, which live no longer in the faith of Protestant reason and free inquiry.  She compromised with them of old, and they have clung about her waist ever since.  She has put her uniform upon them, and made them do service in her cause, and keep alive with their breath the fast expiring embers of faith and imaginative credulity, which she so much loves and commends.  Like an equivocal and ambiguous nature, the old Mother Church, as she is called, is upward fair and Christian, but downward foul and ethnic.  She attacks human nature on the side of the heart, the senses, and those old instincts which Coleridge says bring back the old names.  Reason and intellection, sharpened by science, she abhors; but so large a part of mankind still linger in the rear of the vanguard nations, that she has yet a long lease of life to run, with myriads of adherents to cling to her with fanatical tenacity,—­nay, with proselytes from amongst the poetical, the artistic, and imaginative, who voluntarily prefer to the broad sunshine of science the twilight gloom of her sanctuaries, in order there the better to woo the old inspiration of art, superstitious faith,