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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin;
sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar
religious consciousness. In neither of these senses does it
fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere animal man who
has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware enough
of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards
it, a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and
contractions, which your genuine pagan in the first sense of the
word would never show.
"I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
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