If the first paradise was the paradise of nature, this is the second,
the higher paradise of the human spirit, which in its fair
naturalness, freedom, depth and brightness here comes forth like a
bride out of her chamber. The first wild majesty of the rise of
spiritual life in the East is here circumscribed by the dignity of
form, and softened into beauty. Its depth shows itself no longer in
confusion, obscurity, and inflation, but lies open before us in simple
clearness. Its brightness (Heiterkeit) is not a childish play, but
covers a sadness which knows the baldness of fate but is not by that
knowledge driven out of freedom and measure.' Hegel's Werke, vol. XVI.
p. 139 (translated by Prof. Caird). The simplicity of Herodotus, for
example, does not exclude far reaching thoughts on the political
advantages of liberty, nor such reflections on experience as are
implied in the saying of Artabanus, that the transitoriness of human
life is the least of its evils. And in what modern writing is more of
the wisdom of life condensed than in the History of Thucydides? It is
surely more true to say of Greek literature that it contains types of
all things human, stamped with the freshness, simplicity, and
directness which belong to first impressions, and to the first
impressions of genius.

Now the 'thoughts and aspirations,' which are nowhere absent from
Greek literature, and make a centre of growing warmth and light in its
Periclean period--when the conception of human nature for the first
time takes definite shape--have no less of Religion in them than
underlay the 'creed outworn'. To think otherwise would be an error of
the same kind as that 'abuse of the word Atheism' against which the
author of the work above alluded to protests so forcibly.

Religion, in the sense here indicated, is the mainspring and vital
principle of Tragedy. The efforts of Aeschylus and Sophocles were
sustained by it, and its inevitable decay through the scepticism which
preceded Socrates was the chief hindrance to the tragic genius of
Euripides. Yet the inequality of which we have consequently to
complain in him is redeemed by pregnant hints of something yet 'more
deeply interfused,' which in him, as in his two great predecessors, is
sometimes felt as 'modern,' because it is not of an age but for all
time. The most valuable part of every literature is something which
transcends the period and nation out of which it springs.

On the other hand, much t