Demideity

The river of which I write, is a stream of considerable beauty, though small pretensions; and is the least known of the two or three Eskes of the British Islands. It has the merit of extreme clearness and purity; and its crystal waters meet the tide as pellucid as when they gushed from the parent lake, for no defiling manufactory has been established on the banks. Nature, too, has given the river's course so slight an inclination, that it is untortured by rapids or cataracts, and moves along at a calm and philosophic pace; never losing its temper, or getting into a burst of fluvial passion, ending in froth and folly. No sound, save the murmur of a gentle current, is heard along our quiet river; and if, in times of yore, it had been ornamented by an attendant suite of demideities, like the Grecian streams, a naiad might have invited a mountain hamadryade to breakfast, and thereafter, both might have reclined on the flowery bank, in amicable colloquy, without a ripple on the placid stream big enough to wet their garters.

If the remark be confined to that loftiest sort of heroism, moral bravery, which consists in defying the coalesced opinions of mankind, in obedience to the dictates of conscience, that god within the bosom, and in favor of the right cause, the fact is perfectly true. But if the term, courage, is intended to denote the mere physical quality, the attribute which we possess in common with most animals, the proposition is utterly false. The prowess is of the same specific character with that of the duellist, and often not even superior in degree, which has made the hero and the demideity since the dawn of universal history.

Mrs Kawdle, who had maintained a correspondence with her by letters, was no stranger to the former part of the connexion subsisting between those two lovers, and had always favoured the pretensions of our hero, without being acquainted with his person. She now observed with a smile, that as Aurelia esteemed the knight her guardian angel, and he adored her as a demideity, nature seemed to have intended them for each other; for such sublime ideas exalted them both above the sphere of ordinary mortals. She then ventured to intimate that he was in the house, impatient to pay his respects in person.

The twin bits of our race-souls touched at once. What no Japan(!sc could feel, that rough square man knew, — and he seemed to me a deity, or a demideity, — and I felt like one about to worship West- ern Gods.

One result of all this has been to undermine the influence of saints' images as genii loci, territorial demideities bound up ceremonially with the seasonal reproductive cycle, through feasts celebrated at critical points in the agricultural year.