ou will, I hope, proceed with me, not scornfully any more, to
trace, in the early art of a noble heathen nation, the feeling of what
was at least a better childishness than this of ours; and the efforts to
express, though with hands yet failing, and minds oppressed by ignorant
phantasy, the first truth by which they knew that they lived; the birth
of wisdom and of all her powers of help to man, as the reward of his
resolute labour.

92. "[Greek: Aphaistou technaisi]." Note that word of Pindar in the
Seventh Olympic. This axe-blow of Vulcan's was to the Greek mind truly
what Clytemnestra falsely asserts hers to have been "[Greek: tes de
dexias cheros ergon dikaias tektonos]"; physically, it meant the opening
of the blue through the rent clouds of heaven, by the action of local
terrestrial heat of Hephaestus as opposed to Apollo, who shines on the
surface of the upper clouds, but cannot pierce them; and, spiritually,
it meant the first birth of prudent thought out of rude labour, the
clearing-axe in the hand of the woodman being the practical elementary
sign of his difference from the wild animals of the wood. Then he goes
on, "From the high head of her Father, Athenaia rushing forth, cried
with her great and exceeding cry; and the Heaven trembled at her, and
the Earth Mother." The cry of Athena, I have before pointed out,
physically distinguishes her, as the spirit of the air, from silent
elemental powers; but in this grand passage of Pindar it is again the
mythic cry of which he thinks; that is to say, the giving articulate
words, by intelligence, to the silence of Fate. "Wisdom crieth aloud,
she uttereth her voice in the streets," and Heaven and Earth tremble at
her reproof.

93. Uttereth her voice in "the streets." For all men, that is to say;
but to what work did the Greeks think that her voice was to call them?
What was to be the impulse communicated by her prevailing presence; what
the sign of the people's obedience to her?

This was to be the sign--"But she, the goddess herself, gave to them to
prevail over the dwellers upon earth, _with best-labouring hands in
every art. And by their paths there were the likenesses of living and of
creeping things_; and the glory was deep. For to the cunning workman,
greater knowledge comes, undeceitful."

94. An infinitely pregnant passage, this, of which to-day you are to
note mainly these three things: First, that Athena is the goddess of
Doing, not at all of sentimental i