ave the delight and wonder of
devout worshippers among the haunts of their divinities. Is there not such
delight and wonder in the description of Olwen in the _Mabinogion_: 'More
yellow was her hair than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter
than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than
the blossoms of the wood-anemone amidst the spray of the meadow
fountains.' And is there not such delight and wonder in--

'Meet we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margent of the sea'?

If men had never dreamed that fair women could be made out of flowers, or
rise up out of meadow fountains and paved fountains, neither passage could
have been written. Certainly, the descriptions of nature made in what
Matthew Arnold calls 'the faithful way,' or in what he calls 'the Greek
way,' would have lost nothing if all the meadow fountains or paved
fountains were meadow fountains and paved fountains and nothing more. When
Keats wrote, in the Greek way, which adds lightness and brightness to
nature--

'What little town by river or sea-shore
Or mountain built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn';

when Shakespeare wrote in the Greek way--

'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows';

when Virgil wrote in the Greek way--

'Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,'

and

'Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi';

they looked at nature without ecstasy, but with the affection a man feels
for the garden where he has walked daily and thought pleasant thoughts.
They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people who are
poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a nature which
has faded to be but friendly and pleasant, the way of people who have
forgotten the ancient religion.

III

Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and become
any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in the flaming
sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder-shower, had not our thoughts of
weight and measure. They worshipped nature and the abundance of nature,
and had always, as it seems, for a supreme ritual that tumultuous dance
among the hills or in the depths of the woods, where unearthly ecstasy
fell upon the dancers, until they seemed the gods or the godlike beasts,
and