but a short lease of
life to live, and that his bairns would never run to lisp their sire's
return, nor climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Homer, in the first books of his "Ilias," permits us to glance into the
banqueting-hall of Olympus. The two regular pourers of nectar, to wit,
Hebe and Ganymede, are off duty. Hephaestus the Cripple has taken their
place; and as he halts about from guest to guest, inextinguishable
laughter arises among the gods at his awkward method of "passing the
rosy." His lameness was owing to that sunset fall on the isle of Lemnos
from the threshold of heaven. So, all day long, says the poet, they
revelled, Apollo and the Muses performing the part of a ballet-troop.
It is pleasing to learn that the Olympians kept early hours,
conforming, in this respect, to the rule of Poor Richard. Duly at set
of sun they betook themselves to their couches. Zeus himself slept, and
by his side Here of the Golden Throne.

Who would wish to have lived a pagan under that old Olympian
dispensation, even though, like the dark-eyed Greek of the Atreidean
age, his fancy could have "fetched from the blazing chariot of the Sun
a beardless youth who touched a golden lyre and filled the illumined
groves with ravishment"?--even though, like him, he might in
myrtle-grove and lonely mountain-glen have had favors granted him even
by Idalian Aphrodite the Beautiful, and felt her warm breath glowing
upon his forehead, or been counselled by the blue-eyed Athene, or been
elevated to ample rule by Here herself, Heaven's queen? That Greek
heaven was heartless, libidinous, and cold. It had no mild divinities
appointed to bind up the broken heart and assuage the grief of the
mourner. The weary and the heavy-laden had no celestial resource
amongst its immortal revellers and libertines, male and female. There
was no sympathy for mortal suffering amongst those divine sensualists.
They talked with contempt and unsympathizing ridicule of the woes of
the earthborn, of the brevity of mortal life, and of its miseries. A
boon, indeed, and a grateful exchange, was the Mother Mild of the Roman
Catholic Pantheon, the patroness of the broken-hearted, who inclines
her countenance graciously to the petitions of womanly anguish, for the
voluptuous Aphrodite, the haughty Juno, the Di-Vernonish Artemis, and
the lewd and wanton nymphs of forest, mountain, ocean, lake, and river.
Ceres alone, of the old female classic daemons, seemed to be endow