558 PRÆTERITA-III

whether the fishermen and ocean Gods of Solway, or the marchmen and mountain Gods of Cheviot.* Rarest, nowadays, of all the gifts of cultivated womankind. It used to be said of a Swiss girl, in terms of commendation, she “prays well and dances well”; but now, no human creature can pray at the pace of our common prayers, or dance at the pace of popular gavottes,-more especially the last; for

* I must here once for all explain distinctly to the most matter-of-fact reader, the sense in which throughout all my earnest writing of the last twenty years I use the plural word “gods.” I mean by it, the totality of spiritual powers, delegated by the Lord of the universe to do, in their several heights, or offices, parts of His will respecting men, or the world that man is imprisoned in;-not as myself knowing, or in security believing, that there are such, but in meekness accepting the testimony and belief of all ages, to the presence, in heaven and earth, of angels, principalities, powers, thrones, and the like,-with genii, fairies, or spirits ministering and guardian, or destroying or tempting; or aiding good work and inspiring the mightiest. For all these, I take the general word “gods,” as the best understood in all languages, and the truest and widest in meaning, including the minor ones of seraph, cherub, ghost, wraith, and the like; and myself knowing for an indisputable fact, that no true happiness exists, nor is any good work ever done by human creatures, but in the sense or imagination of such presences. The following passage from the first volume of Fors Clavigera¹ gives examples of the sense in which I most literally and earnestly refer to them:-

“You think it a great triumph to make the sun draw brown landscapes for you! That was also a discovery, and some day may be useful. But the sun had drawn landscapes before for you, not in brown, but in green, and blue, and all imaginable colours, here in England. Not one of you ever looked at them, then; not one of you cares for the loss of them, now, when you have shut the sun out with smoke, so that he can draw nothing more, except brown blots through a hole in a box. There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and evening,-Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light, walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get). You thought you could get it by what the Times calls ‘Railroad Enterprise.’ You enterprised a railroad through the valley, you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange, you Fools everywhere!”

¹ [Letter 5, § 9 (Vol. XXVII. p. 86).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]