so much
interested in the Homeric Gods as in the Homeric mortals, yet the Hymns
are chiefly concerned not with men, but with Gods and their mythical
adventures. However, the interest of the Hymn to Demeter is perfectly
human, for the Goddess is in sorrow, and is mingling with men. The Hymn
to Aphrodite, too, is Homeric in its grace, and charm, and divine sense
of human limitations, of old age that comes on the fairest, as Tithonus
and Anchises; of death and disease that wait for all. The life of the
Gods is one long holiday; the end of our holiday is always near at hand.
The Hymn to Dionysus, representing him as a youth in the fulness of
beauty, is of a charm which was not attainable, while early art
represented the God as a mature man; but literary art, in the Homeric
age, was in advance of sculpture and painting. The chief merit of the
Delian Hymn is in the concluding description of the assembled Ionians,
happy seafarers like the Phaeacians in the morning of the world. The
confusions of the Pythian Hymn to Apollo make it less agreeable; and the
humour of the Hymn to Hermes is archaic. All those pieces, however, have
delightfully fresh descriptions of sea and land, of shadowy dells,
flowering meadows, dusky, fragrant caves; of the mountain glades where
the wild beasts fawn in the train of the winsome Goddess; and the high
still peaks where Pan wanders among the nymphs, and the glens where
Artemis drives the deer, and the spacious halls and airy palaces of the
Immortals. The Hymns are fragments of the work of a school which had a
great Master and great traditions: they also illustrate many aspects of
Greek religion.

In the essays which follow, the religious aspect of the Hymns is chiefly
dwelt upon: I endeavour to bring out what Greek religion had of human and
sacred, while I try to explain its less majestic features as no less
human: as derived from the earliest attempts at speculation and at
mastering the secrets of the world. In these chapters regions are
visited which scholars have usually neglected or ignored. It may seem
strange to seek the origins of Apollo, and of the renowned Eleusinian
Mysteries, in the tales and rites of the Bora and the Nanga; in the
beliefs and practices of Pawnees and Larrakeah, Yao and Khond. But these
tribes, too, are human, and what they now or lately were, the remote
ancestors of the Greeks must once have been. All races have sought
explanations of their own ritual in the a