of the West Indian Ananzi stories; in the cow of the Servian legends,
who spins yarn out of her ear; in the Sampo of the Finns; and in all
those stories of cups, and glasses, and horns, and rings, and swords,
seized by some bold spirit in the midst of a fairy revel, or earned
by some kind deed rendered by mortal hand to one of the 'good folk'
in her hour of need, and with which the '_luck_' [See the well-
known story of 'The Luck of Eden Hall'.] of that mortal's house was
ever afterwards bound up; stories with which the local traditions of
all lands are full, but which all pay unconscious homage to the
worship of that great God, to whom so many heathen hearts so often
turned as the divine realizer of their prayers, and the giver of all
good things, until they come at last to make an idol out of their
hopes and prayers, and to immortalize the very 'Wish' itself.

Again, of all beliefs, that in which man has, at all times of his
history, been most prone to set faith, is that of a golden age of
peace and plenty, which had passed away, but which might be expected
to return. Such a period was looked for when Augustus closed the
temple of Janus, and peace, though perhaps not plenty, reigned over
what the proud Roman called the habitable world. Such a period the
early Christian expected when the Saviour was born, in the reign of
that very Augustus; and such a period some, whose thoughts are more
set on earth than heaven, have hoped for ever since, with a hope
which, though deferred for eighteen centuries, has not made their
hearts sick. Such a period of peace and plenty, such a golden time,
the Norseman could tell of in his mythic Frodi's reign, when gold or
_Frodi's meal_, as it was called, was so plentiful that golden
armlets lay untouched from year's end to year's end on the king's
highway, and the fields bore crops unsown. Here, in England, the
Anglo-Saxon Bede [Hist., ii, 16.] knew how to tell the same story of