Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 | Page 5

suffered any grievance at their
hands. They never drove off my oxen and horses or stole my harvests
in rich-soiled Phthia, the nurse of heroes; for vale-darkening mountains
and a tumultuous sea separate us."
Into that old Homeric world we enter through the portals of the "Ilias"
and "Odusseia," and see the peaks of Olympus shining afar off in white
splendor like silvery clouds, not looking for or expecting either a loftier
or a purer heaven. Somewhere on the bounds of the dim ocean-world
we know that there is an exiled court, a faded sort of St. Germain
celestial dynasty, geologic gods, coevals of the old Silurian strata,--to
wit, Kronos, Rhea, Nox, _et al._ Here these old, unsceptred,
discrowned, and sky-fallen potentates "cogitate in their watery ooze,"
and in "the shady sadness of vales,"--sometimes visited by their
successors for counsel or concealment, or for the purpose of
establishing harmony amongst them. The Sleep and Death of the
Homeric mythology were naturally gentle divinities,--sometimes lifting
the slain warrior from the field of his fame, and bearing him softly
through the air to his home and weeping kindred. This was a gracious
office. The saintly legends of the Roman Church have borrowed a hint
from this old Homeric fancy. One pleasant feature of the Homeric
battles is, that, when some blameless, great-souled champion falls, the
blind old bard interrupts the performances for a moment and takes his
reader with him away from the din and shouting of the battle, following,
as it were, the spirit of the fallen hero to his distant abode, where sit his
old father, his spouse, and children,--thus throwing across the cloud of
battle a sweet gleam of domestic, pastoral life, to relieve its gloom.
Homer, both in the "Ilias" and "Odusseia," gives his readers frequent
glimpses into the halls of Olympus; for messengers are continually
flashing to and fro, like meteors, between the throne of Zeus and the
earth. Sometimes it is Hermes sandalled with down; sometimes it is

wind-footed Iris, who is winged with the emerald plumes of the
rainbow; and sometimes it is Oneiros, or a Dream, that glides down to
earth, hooded and veiled, through the shadow of night, bearing the
behests of Jove. But however often we are permitted to return to the
ambrosial homestead of the ever-living gods in the wake of returning
messengers, we always find it the same calm region, lifted far up above
the turbulence, the perturbations, the clouds and storms of
"That low spot which men call earth,"
--a glorious aërial Sans-Souci and house of pleasaunce.
It is curious that the atheistic Lucretius has given us a most glowing
description of the Olympian mansions; but perhaps the Olympus of the
Epicurean poet and philosopher is somewhat higher up and more
sublimated and etherealized than the Olympus of Homer and of the
popular faith. In a flash of poetic inspiration, he says, "The walls of the
universe are cloven. I see through the void inane. The splendor
(_numen_) of the gods appears, and the quiet seats which are not
shaken by storm-winds nor aspersed by rain-clouds; nor does the
whitely falling snow-flake, with its hoar rime, violate _their summery
warmth_, but an ever-cloudless ether laughs above them with
widespread radiance." Lucretius had all these lineaments of his
Epicurean heaven from old Homer. They are scattered up and down the
"Ilias" and "Odusseia" in the shape of disjecta membra. For instance,
the Olympus which he beholds through a chasm in the walls of the
universe, towering into the pure empyrean, has some of the features of
Homer's island Elysiums, the blissful abodes of mortal heroes who
have been divinized or translated. The Celtic island-valley of Avalon,
the abode of King Arthur, "with its orchard-lawns and bowery
hollows," so exquisitely alluded to by Tennyson, is a kindred spot with
the Homeric Elysian plain. Emerson says, "The race of gods, or those
we erring own, are shadows floating up and down in the still abodes."
This is exactly the meaning of Lucretius also. They are all air-cities,
these seats of the celestials, whatever be the creed,--summery, ethereal
climes, fanned with spice-winds and zephyrs. Meru, Kaf, Olympus,
Elboorz,--they are all alike. The ethnic superior daemons were well
termed the powers of the air. Upward into the far blue gazes the weary
and longing saint and devotee of every faith. Beyond the azure curtains
of the sky, upward into the pure realm, over the rain-cloud and the

thunder and the silver bars of the scirrhus, he places his quiet seats, his
mansions of rest.
The German poet, Schiller, who was a worshipper of Art and
sensualistic beauty, and who regarded the sciences as the mere
handmaids of Art, exalting the aesthetic above the moral nature in man,
quite naturally regretted that he had not lived in