Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 | Page 6

the palmy days of the
anthropomorphic 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 of
sweet Fable trace! The meadows mourn for the old hallowing life;
Vainly we search the earth of gods bereft; Where once the warm and
living shapes were rife, Shadows alone are left! Cold, from the North,
has gone Over the flowers the blast that chilled their May; And, to
enrich the worship of the One, A universe of gods must pass away!
Mourning, I search on yonder starry steeps, But thee, no more, Selene,
there I see! And through the woods I call, and o'er the deeps,
And--Echo answers me." [Bulwer's Translation.]
The Elysian beauty and melancholy grace which Wordsworth throws
over the shade of Alcestis were gleams borrowed from a better world
than the mythic Elysium. Neither Olympus nor Erebus disdained the
pleasures of sense.
Shakspeare, in his "Midsummer-Night's Dream," has mingled the
mythologies of Hellas and Scandinavia, of the North and the South,
making of them a sort of mythic olla podrida. He represents the tiny
elves and fays of the Gothic fairyland, span-long creatures of dew and
moonshine, the lieges of King Oberon, and of Titania, his queen, as
making an irruption from their haunted hillocks, woods, meres,
meadows, and fountains, in the North, into the olive-groves of Ilissus,
and dancing their ringlets in the ray of the Grecian Selene, the chaste,
cold huntress, and running by the triple Hecate's team, following the
shadow of Night round the earth. Strangely must have sounded the
horns of the Northern Elfland, "faintly blowing" in the woods of Hellas,
as Oberon and his grotesque court glanced along, "with bit and bridle
ringing," to bless the nuptials of Theseus with the bouncing Amazon.
Strangely must have looked the elfin footprints in the Attic green.
Across this Shakspearean plank, laid between Olympus and Asgard, or
more strictly Alfheim, we gladly pass from the sunny realm of Zeus
into that of his Northern counterpart, Odin, who ought to be dearer and
more familiar to his descendants than the Grecian Jove, though he is
not. The forms which throng Asgard may not be so sculpturesquely

beautiful, so definite, and fit to be copied in marble and bronze as those
of Olympus. There may be more vagueness of outline in the
Scandinavian abode of the gods, as of far-off blue skyey shapes, but it
is