the
animation of it much stronger than Keats's. But all this sense of
something living in it, he separates in his mind into a great abstract
image of a Sea Power. He never says the waves rage, or the waves are
idle. But he says there is somewhat in, and greater than, the waves,
which rages, and is idle, and _that_ he calls a god.

I do not think we ever enough endeavour to enter into what a Greek's
real notion of a god was. We are so accustomed to the modern mockeries
of the classical religion, so accustomed to hear and see the Greek
gods introduced as living personages, or invoked for help, by men who
believe neither in them nor in any other gods, that we seem to have
infected the Greek ages themselves with the breath, and dimmed them
with the shade, of our hypocrisy; and are apt to think that Homer, as
we know that Pope, was merely an ingenious fabulist; nay, more than
this, that all the nations of past time were ingenious fabulists also,
to whom the universe was a lyrical drama, and by whom whatsoever was
said about it was merely a witty allegory, or a graceful lie, of which
the entire upshot and consummation was a pretty statue in the middle
of the court, or at the end of the garden.

This, at least, is one of our forms of opinion about Greek faith; not,
indeed, possible altogether to any man of honesty or ordinary powers
of thought; but still so venomously inherent in the modern philosophy
that all the pure lightning of Carlyle cannot as yet quite burn it out
of any of us. And then, side by side with this mere infidel folly,
stands the bitter short-sightedness of Puritanism, holding the
classical god to be either simply an idol,--a block of stone
ignorantly, though sincerely, worshipped--or else an actual diabolic
or betraying power, usurping the place of God.

Both these Puritanical estimates of Greek deity are of course to some
extent true. The corruption of classical worship is barren idolatry;
and that corruption was deepened, and variously directed to their own
purposes, by the evil angels. But this was neither the whole, nor the
principal part, of Pagan worship. Pallas was not, in the pure Greek
mind, merely a powerful piece of ivory in a temple at Athens; neither
was the choice of Leonidas between the alternatives granted him by the
oracle, of personal death, or ruin to his country, altogether a work
of the Devil's prompting.

What, then, was actually the Greek god? In what way were these two
ideas of h