A
delicious religion; without austerity, asceticism, or terror; a religion
filled with forms of beauty and nobleness, kindred to their own; with gods
who were capricious indeed, but never stern, and seldom jealous or very
cruel. It was a heaven so near at hand, that their own heroes had climbed
into it, and become demigods. It was a heaven peopled with such a variety
of noble forms, that they could choose among them the protector whom they
liked best, and possibly themselves be selected as favorites by some
guardian deity. The fortunate hunter, of a moonlight night, might even
behold the graceful figure of Diana flashing through the woods in pursuit
of game, and the happy inhabitant of Cyprus come suddenly on the fair form
of Venus resting in a laurel-grove. The Dryads could be seen glancing
among the trees, the Oreads heard shouting on the mountains, and the
Naiads found asleep by the side of their streams. If the Greek chose, he
could take his gods from the poets; if he liked it better, he could find
them among the artists; or if neither of these suited him, he might go to
the philosophers for his deities.

The Greek religion, therefore, did not guide or restrain, it only
stimulated. The Greek, by intercourse with Greek gods, became more a Greek
than ever. Every Hellenic feeling and tendency was personified and took a
divine form; which divine form reacted on the tendency to develop it still
further. All this contributed unquestionably to that wonderful phenomenon,
Greek development. Nowhere on the earth, before or since, has the human
being been educated into such a wonderful perfection, such an entire and
total unfolding of itself, as in Greece. There, every human tendency and
faculty of soul and body opened in symmetrical proportion. That small
country, so insignificant on the map of Europe, so invisible on the map of
the world, carried to perfection in a few short centuries every human art.
Everything in Greece is art; because everything is finished, done
perfectly well. In that garden of the world ripened the masterpieces of
epic, tragic, comic, lyric, didactic poetry; the masterpieces in every
school of philosophic investigation; the masterpieces of history, of
oratory, of mathematics; the masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and
painting. Greece developed every form of human government, and in Greece
were fought and won the great battles of the world. Before Greece,
everything in human literature and art wa