Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 15, January, 1859

싈Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 15, January, 1859

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January, 1859, by Various
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Title: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859
Author: Various
Release Date: January 12, 2004 [eBook #10695]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

CONTENTS
Agrarianism
Bulls and Bears Bundle of Old Letters, A
Calculus, The Differential and Integral Charge with Prince Rupert Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith Coffee and Tea
Did I?
El Llanero
Gymnasium, The
Holbein and the Dance of Death
Illustrious Obscure, The In a Cellar In the Pines
Juanita
Letter to a Dyspeptic, A Lizzy Griswold's Thanksgiving
Men of the Sea Mien-yaun Minister's Wooing, The
New Life of Dante, The
Odds and Ends from the Old World Olympus and Asgard Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?
Palfrey's and Arnold's Histories Plea for the Fijians, A Professor at the Breakfast-Table, The
Roba di Roma
Shakespeare's Art Smollett, Some Unedited Memorials of Stereoscope and Stereograph, The
Trip to Cuba, A Two Sniffs
Utah Expedition, The
White's Shakspeare Why did the Governess Faint? Winter Birds, The
POETRY.
Achmed and his Mare At Sea
Bloodroot
Chicadee
Double-Headed Snake of Newbury, The Drifting
Hamlet at the Boston
Inscription for an Alms-Chest
Joy-Month
Last Bird, The Left Behind
Morning Street, The
Our Skater Belle
Palm and the Pine, The Philter, The Prayer for Life
Sphinx, The Spring
Two Years After
Walker of the Snow, The Waterfall, The
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Allibone's Dictionary of Authors Arabian Days' Entertainments Avenger, The
Bacon, The Works of Bitter-Sweet Bryant. Durand's Portrait, of Bunsen's Gott in der Geschichte
Cotton's Illustrated Cabinet Atlas Courtship of Miles Standish
Dexter's Street Thoughts Duyckinck's Life of George Herbert
Emerson, Rowse's Portrait of Ernest Carroll
Furness's Thoughts on the Life and Character of Jesus
Hamilton's Lecture on Metaphysics Hymns of the Ages
Index to Catalogue of Boston City Library
Lytton, R.B., (Owen Meredith,) Poems by
Mathematical Monthly, The Morgan's, Lady, Autobiography Mothers and Infants, Nurses and Nursing Mustee, The
Prescott's Philip II
Sawyer's New Testament Seddon, Thomas. Memoir and Letters of Sixty Years' Gleanings from Life's Harvest Stratford Gallery, The Symbols of the Capital
Trübner's Bibliographical Guide to American Literature
Vernon Grove
Whittier, Barry's Portrait of Wilson's Conquest of Mexico
LIST OF BOOKS

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. III.--JANUARY, 1859.--NO. XV.

OLYMPUS AND ASGARD.
How remote from the nineteenth century of the Christian era lies the old Homeric world! By the magic of the Ionian minstrel's verse that world is still visible to the inner eye. Through the clouds and murk of twenty centuries and more, it is still possible to catch clear glimpses of it, as it lies there in the golden sunshine of the ancient days. A thousand objects nearer in the waste of past time are far more muffled, opaque, and impervious to vision. As you enter it through the gates of the "Ilias" and "Odusseia," you bid a glad adieu to the progress of the age, to railroads and telegraph-wires, to cotton-spinning, (there might have been some of that done, however, in some Nilotic Manchester or Lowell,) to the diffusion of knowledge and the rights of man and societies for the improvement of our race, to humanitarianism and philanthropy, to science and mechanics, to the printing-press and gunpowder, to industrialism, clipper-ships, power-looms, metaphysics, geology, observatories, light-houses, and a myriad other things too numerous for specification,--and you pass into a sunny region of glorious sensualism, where there are no obstinate questionings of outward things, where there are no blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized, no morbid self-accusings of a morbid methodistic conscience. All there in that old world, lit "by the strong vertical light" of Homer's genius, is healthful, sharply-defined, tangible, definite, and sensualistic. Even the divine powers, the gods themselves, are almost visible to the eyes of their worshippers, as they revel in their mountain-propped halls on the far summits of many-peaked Olympus, or lean voluptuously from their celestial balconies and belvederes, soothed by the Apollonian lyre, the Heban nectar, and the fragrant incense, which reeks up in purple clouds from the shrines of windy Ilion, hollow Lacedaemon, Argos, Mycenae, Athens, and the cities of the old Greek isles, with their shrine-capped headlands. The outlooks and watch-towers of the chief deities were all visible from the far streets and dwellings of their earthly worshippers, in that clear, shining, Grecian atmosphere. Uranography was then far better understood than geography, and the personages composing the heavenly synod were almost as definitely known to the Homeric men as their mortal acquaintances. The architect of the Olympian palaces was surnamed Amphigu?eis, or the Halt. The Homeric gods were men divinized with imperishable frames, glorious and immortal