Fear made the first divinities on earth The sweeping flames of heaven; the ruined tower, Scathed by its stroke. The softly setting sun, The slow declining of the silver moon, And its recovered beauty. Hence the signs Known through the world, and the swift changing year, Circling divided in its varied months. Hence rose the error. Empty folly bade The wearied husbandman to Ceres bring The first fair honours of his harvest fields To gird the brow of Bacchus with the palm, And taught how Pales, 'mid the shepherd bands, Stood and rejoiced, how Neptune in the flood Plunged deep, and ruled the ever-roaring tide; How Vallas reigned o'er earth's stupendous caves Mightily. He who vowed and he who reaped With eager contest, made their gods themselves. [81] The intelligible forms of ancient poets The fair humanities of old religion The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain Or forest or slow stream, or pebbly spring Our chasms and watery depths; all these have vanished They live no longer in the faith of reason. --COLERIDGE. [82] There is, of course, no novelty in these ideas, which are merely a recrudescence and restatement of the notions to which Plutarch thus alludes:-- "We shall also get our hands on the dull crowd, who take pleasure in associating the ideas about these gods either with changes of the atmosphere according to the seasons, or with the generation of corn and sowings and ploughings, and in saying that Osiris is buried when the sown corn is hidden by the earth, and comes to life and shows himself again when it begins to sprout.... They should take very good heed, and be apprehensive lest unwittingly they write off the sacred mysteries and dissolve them into winds and streams and sowings and ploughings and passions of earth and changes of seasons." [83] "The Gnostic movement began long before the Christian era (what its original historical impulse was we do not know), and only one aspect of it, and that from a strictly limited point of view, has been treated by ecclesiastical historians."--Lamplugh, Rev. F., _The Gnosis of the Light_, 1918, p. 10. [84] Holmes, Rice, _Ancient Britain_, p. 295. [85] _Ibid._, p. 373. CHAPTER III A TALE OF TROY