there be a living figure in the landscape, or unless, failing a
living figure, the scene is deliberately described with reference to
the poet or the reader, not as something in itself, but as something
seen by him, and grouped and subordinated exactly as it would strike
his eye and mind. But even this is insufficient. The heart of man
demands more, and so arises a craving after the old nature-mythology
of Greece, the old fairy legends of the Middle Age. The great poets
of the Renaissance both in England and in Italy had a similar
craving. But the aspect under which these ancient dreams are
regarded by them is most significantly different. With Spenser and
Ariosto, fairies and elves, gods and demons, are regarded in their
fancied connection with man. Even in the age of Pope, when the gods
and the Rosicrucian Sylphs have become alike "poetical machinery,"
this is their work. But among the moderns it is as connected with
Nature, and giving a soul and a personality to her, that they are
most valued. The most pure utterance of this feeling is perhaps
Schiller's "Gods of Greece," where the loss of the Olympians is
distinctly deplored, because it has unpeopled, not heaven, but earth.
But the same tone runs through Goethe's classical "Walpurgis Night,"
where the old human "twelve gods," the antitypes and the friends of
men, in whom our forefathers delighted, have vanished utterly, and
given place to semi-physical Nereides, Tritons, Telchines, Psylli,
and Seismos himself.

Keats, in his wonderful "Endymion," contrived to unite the two
aspects of Greek mythology as they never had been united before,
except by Spenser in his "Garden of Adonis." But the pantheistic
notion, as he himself says in "Lamia," was the one which lay nearest
his heart; and in his "Hyperion" he begins to deal wholly with the
Nature gods, and after magnificent success, leaves the poem