If we take away from the amount of what the world possesses that which belongs and is due to the imagination merely—what is not authentic, and could not be sworn to in a court of justice—what will be left? Let us take it away—and what then? There is a sudden solitude in the world. The beautiful is vanished, and the hard, blank remnant of things is full of gaps, and desert places, disastrous flaws and a strange silence. There is nothing now, but facts in this macrocosm. But, believe us, ’tis a very rude, cold place to live in—much worse than ever it was before; and that—in the opinion of the pale pessimist over the way there—was bad enough in all conscience. They who first found out this world, and roamed about on it, had scarcely called it very good when they began to make it better, by peopling its too extensive solitudes—creating phantasms and imaginations for it, where there were none before. The unclothed reality of things was too bare and blank, beautiful as it was, for the first human beings that walked the earth. They looked to the elements, and the infinite host of heaven, and following their unanswerable instincts, they began to make mysteries, airy fabrics and visions. They imagined a god for the cope and the clouds of the firmament, and he wielded the thunderbolts from a high mountain; another, shaped after the most perfectly formed of men, resided in the sun, “The lord of life and poesy and light:” His sister was the goddess of the earth’s satellite— “Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns, To whose bright image nightly by the moon, Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs.” They heard gods in winds and in fire—and altars to these were among the earliest raised. They saw a terrible divinity in the vastness or angry billows of the sea, and imagined a crowd of lesser beings to haunt its caverns and depths. The forests were sacred to the universal Pan—his fauns, sylvans and satyrs; every oak had its hamadryad, every river its naiad or potamid; the oreads took charge of the flowery meadows, and the napææ wandered forever in the shady valleys. Impatient of mere reality, men filled the universe with phantasies and theories— “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, by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms or watery depths.”