"To the Greeks foolishness," I said in my haste; but in very truth it was far from being so. To the Greeks there was nothing extraordinary in the parentage of a river or the love of a God for a mortal. Nor should there be to a Christian who accepts the orthodox account of the foundation of his faith. So far as we know, the generative process of every created thing is the same; it is, therefore, an allowable inference that the same process obtains with the created things which are not sensible to ourselves. If flowers mate and beget as we do, why not winds and waters, why not gods and nymphs, fauns and fairies? It is the creative urgency that imports more than the creative matter. To my mind, _magna componere parvis_, it is my fixed belief that all created nature known to us is the issue of the mighty love of God for his first-made creature the Earth. I accept the Greek mythology as the nearest account of the truth we are likely to get. I have never had the least difficulty in accepting it; and all I have since found out of the relations of men with their fellow-creatures of other genera confirms me in the belief that the urgency is the paramount necessity.
If I am to deal with a case of a mixed marriage, where the wife was a fairy, the spirit of a tree, I shall ask leave to set down first a plain proposition, which is that all Natural Facts (as wind, hills, lakes, trees, animals, rain, rivers, flowers) have an underlying Idea or Soul whereby they really are what they appear, to which they owe the beauty, majesty, pity, terror, love, which they excite in us; and that this Idea, or Soul, having a real existence of its own in community with its companions of the same nature, can be discerned by mortal men in forms which best explain to human intelligence the passions which they excite in human breasts. This is how I explain the fact, for instance, that the austerity of a lonely rock at sea will take the form and semblance, and much more than that, assume the prerogatives of a brooding man, or that the swift freedom of a river will pass by, as in a flash, in the coursing limbs of a youth, or that at dusk, out of a reed-encircled mountain-tarn, silvery under the hush of the grey hour, there will rise, and gleam, and sink again, the pale face, the shoulders and breast of the Spirit of the Pool; that, finally, the grace of a tree, and its panic of fury when lashed by storm, very capable in either case of inspiring love or horror, will be revealed rarely in the form of a nymph. There may be a more rational explanation of these curious things, but I don't know of one: