Brooding over all this I discerned dimly, even in that dusty, brawling place, and time showed me more and more clearly, that I had always been aware of the Gods and conscious of their omnipresence. It seemed plain to me that Zeus, whose haunt is dark Dodona, lorded it over the English skies and was to be heard in the thunder crashing over the elms of Middlesex. I knew Athené in the shrill wind which battled through the vanes and chimneys of our schoolhouse. Artemis was Lady of my country. By Apollo's light might I too come to be led. Poseidon of the dark locks girdled my native seas. I had had good reason to know the awfulness of Pan, and guessed that some day I should couch with Koré the pale Queen. I called them by these names, since these names 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, and had the look of habitancy about it; but I saw no folk. Only at rare moments of time while I hovered afar off looking at the wonder and radiance of it, the Gods appeared above the battlements in a shining row--still and awful, each of them ten feet high.