"Paradise and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic main, why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day."

The incredulity and even derision with which the latter doctrine is
received by "practical men," should not affright the collected thinker,
as it certainly is not so chimerical as they pretend. The writer De
Senancourt, not at all of a religious turn, in speculating on the
shortest possible road to general happiness, concluded that if we were
able to foretell the weather a reasonable time ahead, and if men would
make it a rule to speak the truth as near as they can, these two
conditions would remove nine-tenths of the misery in the world. The
more carefully I meditate on this speculation, the better grounded it
seems. The weather we are learning to know much more about than when the
solitary Obermann penned his despondent dreams; but who shall predict
the time when men will tell the truth?

I now pass to the third great mythical cyclus, which I have called that
of the Hierarchy of the Gods. This was created in order to define that
unknown power which was supposed to give to the wish frustration or
fruition. It includes every statement in reference to the number,
nature, history and character of supernatural beings.

The precise form under which the intellect, when the religious
conception of unknown power first dawns upon it, imagines this unknown,
is uncertain. Some have maintained that the earliest religions are
animal worships, others that the spirits of ancestors or chiefs are the
primitive gods. Local divinities and personal spirits are found in the
rudest culture, while simple fetichism, or the vague shapes presented by
dreams, play a large part in the most inchoate systems. The prominence
of one or the other of these elements depends upon local and national
momenta, which are a proper study for the science of mythology, but need
not detain us here. The underlying principle in all these conceptions of
divinity is that of the _res per accidens_, an accidental relation of
the thought to the symbol, not a general or necessary one. This is seen
in the nature of these primitive gods. They have no decided character as
propitious or t