s of the sea, and the lower spaces of the sky.

Here the strange poem ends at its 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 Marchen 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 baptized
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. {178}

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