If the ruin of Samson by a woman, and the ruin of Hercules by a woman,
have a common legendary origin, it is gratifying to know that we can
also explain, as a fable, the ruin of Nelson by a woman and the ruin
of Parnell by a woman. And, indeed, I have no doubt whatever that,
some centuries hence, the students of folk-lore will refuse altogether
to believe that Elizabeth Barrett eloped with Robert Browning,
and will prove their point up to the hilt by the, unquestionable fact
that the whole fiction of the period was full of such elopements
from end to end.

Possibly the most pathetic of all the delusions of the modern
students of primitive belief is the notion they have about the thing
they call anthropomorphism. They believe that primitive men
attributed phenomena to a god in human form in order to explain them,
because his mind in its sullen limitation could not reach any
further than his own clownish existence. The thunder was called
the voice of a man, the lightning the eyes of a man, because by this
explanation they were made more reasonable and comfortable.
The final cure for all this kind of philosophy is to walk down
a lane at night. Any one who does so will discover very quickly
that men pictured something semi-human at the back of all things,
not because such a thought was natural, but because it was supernatural;
not because it made things more comprehensible, but because it
made them a hundred times more incomprehensible and mysterious.
For a man walking down a lane at night can see the conspicuous fact
that as long as nature keeps to her own course, she has no power
with us at all. As long as a tree is a tree, it is a top-heavy
monster with a hundred arms, a thousand tongues, and only one leg.
But so long as a tree is a tree, it does not frighten us at all.
It begins to be something alien, to be something strange, only when it