CHAPTER II. 



RELIGION. 



When the poet invokes in his splendid frenzy the 

 shining spheres of heaven, the murmuring fountains, 

 and the rushing streams ; when he calls upon the 

 earth to hearken, and bids the wild sea listen to his 

 song ; when he communes with the sweet secluded 

 valleys and the haughty-headed hills, as if those in- 

 animate objects were alive, as if those masses of brute 

 matter were endowed with sense and thought, we do 

 not smile, we do not sneer, we do not reason, but we 

 feel. A secret chord is touched within us : a slumber- 

 ing sympathy is awakened into life. Who has not 

 felt an impulse of hatred, and perhaps expressed it in 

 a senseless curse against a fiery stroke of sunlight, or 

 a sudden gust of wind ? Who has not felt a pang of 

 pity for a flower torn and trampled in the dust ; a 

 shell dashed to fragments by the waves ? Such emo- 

 tions or ideas last only for a moment : they do not 

 belong to us ; they are the fossil fancies of a bygone 

 age ; they are a heritage of thought from the child- 

 hood of our race. For there was a time when they 

 possessed the human mind. There was a time when 

 the phrases of modern poetry were the facts of ordin- 

 ary life. There was a time when man lived in fellow- 

 ship with nature, believing that all things which moved 

 or changed had minds and bodies kindred to his own. 

 To those primeval people the sun was a great being, 



