xplanation nor redress, could
but petrify the heart of man. To the Hebrew, the beauty of the world was
dangerous, and man must learn to turn away his eyes from beholding
vanity.

The legend of Medusa is a story of despair, and there is little room in
it for idealism of any kind; and yet there may be some hint, in the
reflecting shield of Perseus, of a brighter and more heartening truth.
The horror of the world we have always with us, and for all exquisite
spirits like those of the Greeks there is the danger of their being
marred by the brutality of the universe, and made hard and cold in rigid
petrifaction by the too direct vision of evil. Yet for such spirits
there is ever some shield of faith, in whose reflection they may see the
darkest horrors and yet remain flesh and blood. Those who believe in
life and love, whose religion--or at least whose indomitable clinging to
the beauty they have once descried--has taught them sufficient courage
in dwelling upon these things, may come unscathed through any such
ordeal. But for that, the story is one of sheer pagan terror. It came
out of the old, dark pre-Olympian mythology (for the Gorgons are the
daughters of Hades), and it embodied the ancient truth that the sorrow
of the world worketh death. It is a tragic world, and the earth-bound,
looking upon its tragedy, will see in it only the _macabre_, and feel
that graveyard and spectral air which breathes about the haunted pagan
sepulchre.

Another myth in which we see the contrast between essential paganism and
idealism is that of Orpheus. The myth appears in countless forms and
with innumerable excrescences, but in the main it is in three successive
parts. The first of these tells of the sweet singer loved by all the
creatures, the dear friend of all the world, whose charm nothing that
lived on earth could resist, and whose spell hurt no creature whom it
allured. The conception stands in sharp contrast to the ghastly statuary
that adorned Medusa's precincts. Here, with a song whose sweetness
surpassed that of the Sirens, nature, dead and living both (for all
lived unto Orpheus), followed him with glad and loving movement. Nay,
not only beasts and trees, but stones themselves and even mountains,
felt in the hard heart of them the power of this sweet music. It is one
of the most perfect stories ever told--the precursor of the legends that
gathered round Francis of Assisi and many a later saint and artist. It
is the prophecy fr