“In th’ olde dayes of the King Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye. 
The elf-queen, with hir joly companye,
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede;
This was the olde opinion, as I rede. 
But now can no man see none elves mo. 
For now the grete charitee and prayeres
Of limitours and othere holy freres,

* * * * *

This maketh that there been no fayeryes. 
For ther as wont to walken was an elf,
Ther walketh now the limitour himself.”

Against this impoverishment the human revolt was inevitable, and it explains the spirit in such writers as Shelley and Goethe.  Children of nature, who love the sun and the grass, and are at home upon the earth, their spirits cry for something to delight and satisfy them, nearer than speculations of theology or cold pictures of heaven.  Wordsworth, in his famous lines, has expressed the protest in the familiar words:—­

               “Great God, I’d rather be
     A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn;
     So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
     Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
     Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
     Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”

The early classic thought which found its most perfect expression in the mythology of Greece was not originally or essentially pagan.  It was humanistic, and represented the response of man’s spirit to that free and beautiful spirit which he found in nature around him.  All such symbolism of Greek religion as that of the worship of Dionysus and Ceres, shows this.  In these cults the commonest things of life, the wine and corn wherewith man sustained himself, assumed a higher and richer meaning.  Food and drink were not mere sensual gratifications, but divine gifts, as they are in the twenty-third Psalm; and the whole material world was a symbol and sacrament of spiritual realities and blessings.  Similarly the ritual of Eleusis interpreted man’s common life into a wonderful world of mystic spirituality.  Thus there was a great fund of spiritual insight of the finest and most beautiful sort in the very heart of that life which has thoughtlessly been adopted as the type of paganism.

Yet the history of Greece affords the explanation and even the justification of the popular idea.  The pagan who is in us all, tends ever to draw us downwards from sacramental and symbolic ways of thinking to the easier life of the body and the earth.  On the one hand, for blood that is young and hot, the life of sense is overwhelming.  On the other hand, for the weary toiler whose mind is untrained, the impression of the world is that of heavy clay.  Each in his own way finds idealism difficult to retain.  The spirituality of nature floats like a dream before the mind of poets, and is seen now and then in wistful glimpses by every one; but it needs some clearer and