What was snow-bearded Odin, trow, The mighty hunter long ago, Whose horn and hounds the peasant hears Still when the Northlights shake their spears? Science hath answers twain, I’ve heard; Choose which you will, nor hope a third; Whichever box the truth be stowed in, There’s not a sliver left of Odin. Either he was a pinchbrowed thing, With scarcely wit a stone to fling, A creature both in size and shape Nearer than we are to the ape, Who hung sublime with brat and spouse By tail prehensile from the boughs, And, happier than his maimed descendants, The culture-curtailed independents, Could pluck his cherries with both paws, And stuff with both his big-boned jaws; Or else the core his name enveloped Was from a solar myth developed, Which, hunted to its primal shoot, Takes refuge in a Sanskrit root, Thereby to instant death explaining The little poetry remaining. Try it with Zeus, ’tis just the same; The thing evades, we hug a name; Nay, scarcely that,--perhaps a vapor Born of some atmospheric caper. All Lempriere’s fables blur together In cloudy symbols of the weather, And Aphrodite rose from frothy seas But to illustrate such hypotheses. With years enough behind his back, Lincoln will take the selfsame track, And prove, hulled fairly to the cob, A mere vagary of Old Prob. Give the right man a solar myth, And he’ll confute the sun therewith. They make things admirably plain, But one hard question _will_ remain: If one hypothesis you lose, Another in its place you choose, But, your faith gone, O man and brother, Whose shop shall furnish you another? One that will wash, I mean, and wear, And wrap us warmly from despair? While they are clearing up our puzzles, And clapping prophylactic muzzles On the Actæon’s hounds that sniff Our devious track through But and If, Would they’d explain away the Devil And other facts that won’t keep level, But rise beneath our feet or fail, A reeling ship’s deck in a gale! God vanished long ago, iwis, A mere subjective synthesis; A doll, stuffed out with hopes and fears, Too homely for us pretty dears, Who want one that conviction carries, Last make of London or of Paris. He gone, I felt a moment’s spasm, But calmed myself with Protoplasm, A finer name, and, what is more, As enigmatic as before; Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease Minds caught in the Symplegades Of soul and sense, life’s two conditions, Each baffled with its own omniscience. The men who labor to revise Our Bibles will, I hope, be wise, And print it without foolish qualms Instead of God in David’s psalms: Noll had been more effective far Could he have shouted at Dunbar, “Rise, Protoplasm!” No dourest Scot Had waited for another shot.