expressed to me their essence: you may call them what you will, and so
might I, for I had not then reasoned with myself about names. By their
names I knew them. The Gods were there, indeed, ignorantly worshipped
by all and sundry. Then the Dryad of my earlier experience came up
again, and I saw that she stood in such a relation to the Gods as I
did, perhaps, to the Queen of England; that she, no less than they,
was part of a wonderful order, and the visible expression of the
spirit of some Natural Fact. But whether above all the Gods and
nations of men and beasts there were one God and Father of us all,
whether all Nature were one vast synthesis of Spirit having
innumerable appearance but one soul, I did not then stay to inquire,
and am not now prepared to say. I don't mean by that at all that I
don't believe it. I do believe it, but by an act of religion; for
there are states of the individual mind, states of impersonal soul in
which this belief is a positive truth, in the which one exults madly,
or by it is humbled to the dust. Religion, to my mind, is the result
of this consciousness of kinship with the principle of Life; all the
emotion and moral uplifting involved in this tremendous certainty, and
all the lore gathered and massed about it--this is Religion. Young as
I was at the time I now speak of, ignorant and dumb as I was, I had my
moments of exultation and humility,--moments so wild that I was
transported out of myself. I left my body supine in its narrow bed and
soared above the stars. At such times, in an æther so deep that the
blue of it looked like water, I seemed to see the Gods themselves, a
shining row of them, upon the battlements of Heaven. I called Heaven
Olympus, and conceived of Olympus as a towered city upon a white hill.
Looming up out of the deep blue arch, it was vast and covered the
whole plateau: I saw the walls of it run up and down the ridges, in
and out of the gorges which cut into the mass. It had gates, but I
never saw forms of any who entered or left it. It was full of light,