Pagan Papers eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 82 pages of information about Pagan Papers.

Pagan Papers eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 82 pages of information about Pagan Papers.
forlorn sense of a vanished heritage.  Willing enough are we to ``let the ape and tiger die’’; but the pleasant cousins dissembled in hide and fur and feather are not all tigers and apes:  which last vile folk, indeed, exist for us only in picture-books, and chiefly offend by always carrying the Sunday School ensign of a Moral at their tails.  Others —­ happily of less didactic dispositions —­ there be; and it is to these unaffected, careless companions that the sensible child is wont to devote himself; leaving severely alone the stiff, tame creatures claiming to be of closer kin.  And yet these playmates, while cheerfully admitting him of their fellowship, make him feel his inferiority at every point.  Vainly, his snub nose projected earthwards, he essays to sniff it with the terrier who (as becomes the nobler animal) is leading in the chase; and he is ready to weep as he realises his loss.  And the rest of the Free Company, —­ the pony, the cows, the great cart-horses, —­ are ever shaming him by their unboastful exercise of some enviable and unattainable attribute.  Even the friendly pig, who (did but parents permit) should eat of his bread and drink of his cup, and be unto him as a brother, —­ which among all these unhappy bifurcations, so cheery, so unambitious, so purely contented, so apt to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of boyhood as he?  What wonder that at times, when the neophyte in life begins to realise that all these desirable accomplishments have had to be surrendered one by one in the process of developing a Mind, the course of fitting out a Lord of Creation, he is wont —­ not knowing the extent of the kingdom to which he is heir —­ to feel a little discontented?

Ere now this ill-humour, taking root in a nature wherein the animal is already ascendant, has led by downward paths to the Goat-Foot, in whom the submerged human system peeps out but fitfully, at exalted moments.  He, the peevish and irascible, shy of trodden ways and pretty domesticities, is linked to us by little but his love of melody; but for which saving grace, the hair would soon creep up from thigh to horn of him.  At times he will still do us a friendly turn:  will lend a helping hand to poor little Psyche, wilfully seeking her own salvation; will stand shoulder to shoulder with us on Marathon plain.  But in the main his sympathies are first for the beast:  to which his horns are never horrific, but, with his hairy pelt, ever natural and familiar, and his voice (with its talk of help and healing) not harsh nor dissonant, but voice of very brother as well as very god.

And this declension —­ for declension it is, though we achieve all the confidences of Melampus, and even master with him the pleasant argot of the woods —­ may still be ours if we suffer what lives in us of our primal cousins to draw us down.  On the other hand, let soul inform and irradiate body as it may, the threads are utterly shorn asunder never:  nor is man, the complete, the self-contained, permitted

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Pagan Papers from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.