What question? If they are meant as _real_, though not Impersonations of the Poet, they were Impersonations of the human mind from an earlier and more believing time. Whether they were simply and purely from human feeling, in the bosom of human society, or were framed for the belief of others by the skilful artificers of belief, is not of positive moment as to the evidence to the operations and dispositions of the human mind. Those who presided over the national life of every religion might deliberately contrive, and might deliver over to the credence of their nation, imaginary powers, conceived with inventive imagination, as a Poet conceives them. But the very inventions, and still more the simple faith that received the inventions, show the intellectual disposition to embody in living powers the causes of effects. The faith of the people shows further the disposition and ability of the human mind to attribute reality, and that by force of feeling, to the creations of its own intellect, and particularly its aptitude to cleave to those creations in which it embodies power of which it strongly feels the effects. But I would rather believe that such faith has often formed itself in the bosom of simple societies without devisers—that men have conceived and felt till they believed; that they felt delight and beauty in a gushing fountain till they believed in a presiding spirit as fair—that the sun, the giver of light and warmth, of the day and of the year, could not appear to them a mere star of day, a larger, brighter fire. They felt a gift in his rays, and in their influence, and deified the visible orb. They thought of—they saw the terrors of war, and believed that some Power delighting in blood stirred up the hearts of men to mutual destruction. TALBOYS.