crystallise about what at first were little more than names; till at
last, from the womb of the dark enigma that haunted him in the
beginning, there emerges into the charmed light of a world of ideal
grace a pantheon of fair and concrete personalities. Nature has become a
company of spirits; every cave and fountain is haunted by a nymph; in
the ocean dwell the Nereids, in the mountain the Oread, the Dryad in the
wood; and everywhere, in groves and marshes, on the pastures or the
rocky heights, floating in the current of the streams or traversing
untrodden snows, in the day at the chase and as evening closes in
solitude fingering his flute, seen and heard by shepherds, alone or with
his dancing train, is to be met the horned and goat-footed, the sunny-
smiling Pan.

Thus conceived, the world has become less terrible because more
familiar. All that was incomprehensible, all that was obscure and dark,
has now been seized and bodied forth in form, so that everywhere man is
confronted no longer with blind and unintelligible force, but with
spiritual beings moved by like passions with himself. The gods, it is
true, were capricious and often hostile to his good, but at least they
had a nature akin to his; if they were angry, they might be propitiated;
if they were jealous, they might be appeased; the enmity of one might be
compensated by the friendship of another; dealings with them, after all,
were not so unlike dealings with men, and at the worst there was always
a chance for courage, patience and wit.

Man, in short, by his religion has been made at home in the world; and
that is the first point to seize upon. To drive it home, let us take an
illustration from the story of Odysseus. Odysseus, it will be
remembered, after the sack of Troy, for ten years was a wanderer on the
seas, by tempest, enchantment, and every kind of danger detained, as it