Milton in his glowing description of the early creation, thus
alludes to Pan as the personification of Nature:
"... Universal Pan,
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance,
Led on the eternal spring."
And describing Eve's abode:
"... In shadier bower,
More sacred or sequestered, though but feigned,
Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymph
Nor Faunus haunted."
--Paradise Lost, B. IV.
It was a pleasing trait in the old Paganism that it loved to trace
in every operation of nature the agency of deity. The imagination
of the Greeks peopled all the regions of earth and sea with
divinities, to whose agency it attributed those phenomena which
our philosophy ascribes to the operation of the laws of nature.
Sometimes in our poetical moods we feel disposed to regret the
change, and to think that the heart has lost as much as the head
has gained by the substitution. The poet Wordsworth thus strongly
expresses this sentiment:
"... Great God, I'd rather be
A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."
Schiller, in his poem "Die Gotter Griechenlands," expresses his
regret for the overthrow of the beautiful mythology of ancient
times in a way which has called forth an answer from a Christian
poet, Mrs.
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