"
Once goblinized, Herodias joins them, doomed still to bear about the
Baptist's head; and Woden, who, first losing his identity in the Wild
Huntsman, sinks by degrees into the mere _spook_ of a Suabian baron,
sinfully fond of field-sports, and therefore punished with an eternal
phantasm of them, "the hunter and the deer a shade." More and more
vulgarized, the infernal train snatches up and sweeps along with it every
lawless shape and wild conjecture of distempered fancy, streaming away at
last into a comet's tail of wild-haired hags, eager with unnatural hate
and more unnatural lust, the nightmare breed of some exorcist's or
inquisitor's surfeit, whose own lie has turned upon him in sleep.
As it is painfully interesting to trace the gradual degeneration of a
poetic faith into the ritual of unimaginative Tupperism, so it is amusing
to see pedantry clinging faithfully to the traditions of its prosaic
nature, and holding sacred the dead shells that once housed a moral
symbol. What a divine thing the _out_side always has been and continues
to be! And how the cast clothes of the mind continue always to be in
fashion! We turn our coats without changing the cut of them. But was it
possible for a man to change not only his skin but his nature? Were there
such things as _versipelles, lycanthropi, werwolfs,_ and _loupgarous?_ In
the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the later poetry has become
science.
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