strangest moment, with the cry,
which must have been uttered so often, but is heard here alone, of a
people reluctantly deserting the gods that it has fashioned in its own
likeness, for a faith that has not sprung from its needs or fears. Yet
it cherishes the hope that this tyranny shall pass over: 'they are
gods, and behold they shall die, and the waves be upon them at last.'

As the 'Kalevala,' and as all relics of folklore, all _Maerchen_ and
ballads prove, the lower mythology--the elemental beliefs of the
people--do survive beneath a thin covering of Christian conformity.
There are, in fact, in religion, as in society, two worlds, of which
the one does not know how the other lives. The class whose literature
we inherit, under whose institutions we live, at whose shrines we
worship, has changed as outworn raiment its manners, its gods, its
laws; has looked before and after, has hoped and forgotten, has
advanced from the wilder and grosser to the purest faith. Beneath the
progressive class, and beneath the waves of this troublesome world,
there exists an order whose primitive form of human life has been far
less changeful, a class which has put on a mere semblance of new
faiths, while half-consciously retaining the remains of immemorial
cults.

Obviously, as M. Fauriel has pointed out in the case of the modern
Greeks, the life of such folk contains no element of progress, admits
no break in continuity. Conquering armies pass and leave them still
reaping the harvest of field and river; religions appear, and they are
baptised by thousands, but the lower beliefs and dreads that the
progressive class has outgrown remain unchanged.

Thus, to take the instance of modern Greece, the high gods of the
divine race of Achilles and Agamemnon are forgotten, but the
descendants of the Penestae, the _villeins_ of Thessaly, still dread
the beings of the popular creed, the Nereids, the Cyclopes, and the
Lamia.[181]

The last lesson we would attempt to gather from the 'Kalevala' is
this: that a comparison of the _thoroughly popular_ beliefs of all
countries, the beliefs cherished by the non-literary classes whose
ballads and fairy tales have only recently been collected, would
probably reveal a general identity, concealed by diversity of name,
among the 'lesser people of the skies,' the elves, fairies, cyclopes,
giants, nereids, brownies, lamiae. It could then be shown that some of
these spirits survive among the lower beings of