omorphic creed of Hellas, before the dirge of Pan was chanted in
the Isle of Naxos. His "Gods of Greek Land" is as fine a piece of
heathenish longing as could well be written at so late a day. His heart
was evidently far away from the century in which he lived, and pulsated
under that distant Grecian sky of which he somewhere speaks. For
artistic purposes the myths of Greece formed a glorious faith. Grace
and symmetry of form were theirs, and they satiated the eye with
outward loveliness; but to the deep fountains of feeling and sentiment,
such as a higher faith has unsealed in the heart, they never
penetrated. What a poor, narrow little world was that myth-haunted one
of the Grecian poet and sculptor, and even philosopher, compared with
the actual world which modern science is revealing from year to year!
What a puny affair was that Grecian sun, with its coachman's apparatus
of reins, fire-breathing nags, and golden car, which Schiller looks
back to, in the spirit of Mr. Weller, Senior, when compared with the
vast empyreal sphere and light-fountain of modern science, with its
retinue of planets, ships of space, freighted with souls! Science the
handmaid of Art! Well might the mere artist and worshipper of
anthropomorphic beauty shrink appalled, and sigh for a lodge under some
low Grecian heaven and in the bosom of some old myth-peopled Nature, as
he trembled before the apocalypses of modern sidereal science, which
has dropped its plummet to unimaginable depths through the nebulous
abysses of space, shoaled with systems of worlds as the sea is with its
finny droves. The Nature and the Physical Universe of the old ethnic
Greek formed only a little niche and recess, on the walls of which the
puny human image was easily reflected in beautiful and picturesque and
grotesque shadows, which were mistaken for gods. But the Nature and
Universe revealed by modern Christian science are too vast and profound
to mirror anything short of the image of the Omnipotent himself.

Still there is a period in the life of every imaginative youth, when he
is a pagan and worships in the old Homeric pantheon,--where self-denial
and penance were unknown, and where in grove and glen favored mortal
lover might hear the tread of "Aphrodite's glowing sandal." The
youthful poet may exclaim with Schiller,--

"Art thou, fair world, no more?
Return, thou virgin-bloom on Nature's face!
Ah, only on the minstrel's magic shore
Can we the footstep o