There is no longer
any sacred inaccessibility, no longer any enchanting unexpectedness, and
life turns to prose the moment there is nothing unattainable. It needs
no more a voice out of the unknown proclaiming "Great Pan is dead!" We
have found his tombstone, deciphered the arrow-headed inscription upon
it, know his age to a day, and that he died universally regretted.
Formerly science was poetry. A mythology which broods over us in our
cradle, which mingles with the lullaby of the nurse, which peoples the
day with the possibility of divine encounters, and night with intimation
of demonic ambushes, is something quite other, as the material for
thought and poetry, from one that we take down from our bookshelves, as
sapless as the shelf it stood on, as remote from all present sympathy
with man or nature as a town history with its genealogies of Mr.
Nobody's great-grandparents.
We have utilized everything. The Egyptians found a hint of the solar
system in the concentric circles of the onion, and revered it as a
symbol, while we respect it as a condiment in cookery, and can pass
through all Weathersfield without a thought of the stars. Our world is a
museum of natural history; that of our forefathers was a museum of
supernatural history. And the rapidity with which the change has been
going on is almost startling, when we consider that so modern and
historical a personage as Queen Elizabeth was reigning at the time of
the death of Dr.
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