If "a pagan suckled in a creed outworn" could "Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn," much more were such sights and sounds familiar to his forefathers, to whom the same beliefs were fresh and real.

Even to the present day Greek peasants may often be found who can tell of such experiences; to them, as to the Greeks of old, desert places and remote woods and mountains are terrible, not because they are lonely, but because when a man is alone then is he least alone; hence the panic terror, the terror of Pan.
The same idea, which later takes the religious or philosophic form of the belief in the omnipresence of the deity, peopled the woods with dryads, the streams and springs with nymphs and river-gods, the seas with Nereids and Tritons.

When an artist represented a mountain or a river-god, a nymph or a Triton, or added such figures to a scene to indicate its locality by what seems to us at first sight a mere artistic convention, he was not inventing an impersonation, but he was representing something which, in the imagination of the people, might actually be seen upon the spot--at least, by those whose eyes were opened to see it.

It was the same gift of imagination that made Blake say: "'What,' it will be questioned, 'when the sun rises, do you not see a disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea ?' 'Oh no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!" I question not my corporeal eye, any more than I would question a window, concerning a sight.

I look through it, and not with it.'"[1] [Footnote 1: Blake, "Aldine" edition, p.