gedy which he
calls Psychostasia, wherein he introduceth Thetis and Aurora standing
by Jupiter's balances, and deprecating each of them the death of her
son engaged in a duel. Now there is no man but sees that this fable is
a creature of the poet's fancy, designed to delight or scare the reader.
But this other passage,--

Great Jove is made the treasurer of wars;
(Ibid. iv. 84.)

and this other also,--

When a god means a noble house to raze,
He frames one rather than he'll want a cause:
(From the "Niobe" of Aeschylus, Frag. 151.)

these passages, I say, express their judgment and belief who thereby
discover and suggest to us the ignorant or mistaken apprehensions they
had of the Deities. Moreover, almost every one knows nowadays, that the
portentous fancies and contrivances of stories concerning the state of
the dead are accommodated to popular apprehensions,--that the spectres
and phantasms of burning rivers and horrid regions and terrible tortures
expressed by frightful names are all mixed with fable and fiction, as
poison with food; and that neither Homer nor Pindar nor Sophocles ever
believed themselves when they wrote at this rate:--

There endless floods of shady darkness stream
From the vast caves, where mother Night doth teem;

and,

There ghosts o'er the vast ocean's waves did glide,
By the Leucadian promontory's side;
("Odyssey," xxiv. 11.)

and,

There from th' unfathomed gulf th' infernal lake
Through narrow straits recurring tides doth make.

And yet, as many of them as deplore death as a lamentable thing, or the
want of burial after death as a calamitous condition, are wont to break
out into expressions of this nature:--

O pass not by, my friend; nor leave me here
Without a grave, and on that grave a tear;
("Odyssey," xi. 72.)

and,

Then to the ghosts the mournful soul did fly,
Sore grieved in midst of youth and strength to die;
("Iliad," xvi. 856.)

and again,

'Tis sweet to see the light. O spare me then,
Till I arrive at th' usual age of men:
Nor force my unfledged soul from hence, to know
The doleful state of dismal shades below.
(Euripides, "Iphigenia at Aulus," 1218.)

These, I say, are the speeches of men persuaded of these things, as
being possessed by erroneous opinions; and therefore they touch us the
more nearly and torment us inwardly, because we ours