vapour and sunshine and wind and water, says one.

Yet to the soul how much more!

And why? Answer me that if you can. There, truly, we set our feet on the
vanishing road.

Whatever reality, much or little, the personifications of Greek
Nature-worship had for the ancient world, there is no doubt that for a
certain modern temperament, more frequently met with every day, those
personifications are becoming increasingly significant, and one might
almost say veritably alive. Forgotten poets may, in the first instance,
have been responsible for the particular forms they took, their names
and stories, yet even so they but clothed with legend presences of wood
and water, of earth and sea and sky, which man dimly felt to have a
real existence; and these presences, forgotten or banished for a while
in prosaic periods, or under Puritanic repression, are once more being
felt as spiritual realities by a world coming more and more to evoke its
divinities by individual meditation on, and responsiveness to, the
mysterious so-called natural influences by which it feels itself
surrounded. Thus the first religion of the world seems likely to be its
last. In other words, the modern tendency, with spiritually sensitive
folk, is for us to go direct to the fountain-head of all theologies,
Nature herself, and, prostrating ourselves before her mystery, strive to
interpret it according to our individual "intimations," listening,
attent, for ourselves to her oracles, and making, to use the phrase of
one of the profoundest of modern Nature-seers, our own "reading of
earth." Such was Wordsworth's initiative, and, as some one has said, "we
are all Wordsworthians today." That pagan creed, in which Wordsworth
passionately wished himself suckled, is not "outworn." He himself, in