Call ye the Gods of Hellas dead? Call ye the faith and the poetry no more? Deem ye that oblivion and decay can compass the immortal? — that life can be absorbed in death? In truth, nay! Under other names, and masked in other forms, the Gods of Greece yet hold place upon the earth-the deities of Olympos yet dwell among men! And if not now, as of old—if not now, as the cloud-compelling Zeus, the venerable Hera, the far-darting Apollo, the well-tressed, laughter-loving, queen of love sweet Aphrodite, sea-born darling!-if not as these, yet as other impersonations, true, beautiful, and living as they. As the saint and the hero - as the maid, the wife, and the mother as the senator, the general, and the paladin as the present forms of life, the divinities of the past make good their claim to immortality. And this, because of their TRUTH. Because they were life-like, embodying the passions of all times and the characteristics of universal manhood, clothing in local fashions forms whose type is from the beginning, and through all ages, and in all climes; because they find an echo in the heart of man, the Gods of Greece still possess their lovers and their children, Olympos still detains his worshippers! Life cannot die! Death is a nullity—a wizzard's name wherewith to frighten children— the goblin of a painted show!-nor can that which has once dwelt in strong and healthy shape among men, and been their food, their soul's companion, their life, their God-ever fade away into nothingness, leaving not a shadow of themselves and of their power. Neither is it unprofitable, this looking to the past; for all that has ever been of interest or of service to man, must still continue to be so, if properly viewed and understood. Our passions, intellect, life, desires, aspirations, are all the same now, as in the days of Pericles; the difference is only in society-only in the dress. Our senators wear black coats and chimney hats, instead of the chiton and the orator's myrtle crown; but they are the same men, discussing the same principles, though the particular questions are unlike, as once collected in the Pnyx, and who now yawn upon the Commons' benches. But we are all so fettered by forms, so imposed on by appearances, so swayed by names, that we hedge round our own day as a thing utterly apart - an isolated plot of timea foreign land in the great world of feeling

an unwrit page of history- a day which shall not see one moment like to the past — which shall not give back one passion or one interest that used to influence men. This feeling of isolation in the world's history was never more powerful than at present; caused by the application of principles which have worked a revolution in society, truly; but man himself remains the same! If a nation, such as Greece, in all its refinement, polish, and learning, could find truth and beauty in its mythology, we also must surely meet with much in that same mythology both interesting and useful to us. We must surely find that a whole people did not concur in worshipping dead, dry forms, but that beneath these forms ran an undercurrent of deep meaningwithin these eidola, dwelt a spirit of life. And in truth, they were no mere names, these Gods of Greece! They were no elemental facts, poetically portrayed, embodying nothing deeper than the physical phenomena of nature; they were no dull records of past events, when history was confused, and a mythic legend became the sole chronicle of the hero's deeds; they were not chymic mysteries- they were not scholastic subtleties, — but they were faithful transcripts of human nature. They were true-they are immortal!

Oh! we could not part with them—our brethren of Olympos - we could not blot out from the sky our brightest stars of poetry! In all this frantic haste, this giant noise, this speedy flight toward the dim future, we turn back to the asphodelian plains, the calm heroic grandeur, the stately dignity, the stillness, and the beauty of the Grecian age, as the late-weaned child turns still and still to its estranged mother; and a quiet, as from an evening sky, falls on us while we look upon this fair picture of the past! It stands out from the smoke and heat of the weary Now, as the shade of its own Achilles in the mists about the isle of Leucè; the features of its glory fixed, the forms of its loveliness determined. One by one our dreams of youth fade in the gray dawn of reality; one by one the fairest blossoms of our hope wither from the tree ere they be plucked, or plucked, are proved but bitterness to the taste: one by one our friends and lovers part into the distance, and we are left alone with our affections; but midst all our sorrow and our solitude, still cling we to thee, brightest land of love and beauty — still band we to thy side, fair and fruitful Hellas!

The Present has many noble names, and the

works done now and lately are glorious, and will be enduring; but the olden time overtops us yet! In poetry and art infinitely, in bravery and in eloquence-aye! Our Flaxmans are not Pheidias nor Praxiteles; our Peels and our Russels are not Pericles nor Phocion; our Sheils and our Grattans are not Demosthenes; nor, by a declining scale, are our Trafalgar fountains, National Galleries, and Duke's statues, equal to the nine-piped fount of the sweet Callirrhöe, the Painted Portico, or the horses of Lysippos-no! no! The Present has its press, its steam, its true religion, its unfettered speech, its social clubs and benefit societies—both of which were also general in Greece, under the name of pavo-its learned women, and its manly children; but the sunny brightness of the past shames our gas-light many a time yet when we look at them together. It is the same with our characters as with our theatres. The Greeks performed by the light of Heaven, with no false glare of blue or red, no stage-lamps, no unnatural skies, no impossible scenes; their artistic aids were all for grandeur; nature was left the same in kind, only increased in degree not travestied altogether, into a thing unnatural and untrue. They had their high cothurni, their tragic masks, their sweeping robes, their stage gestures, and their dramatic voices; but still the clear sun shone over all, and distance, not falseness, was the softening medium between the spectator and the actor. With us, nature is overlaid by a false superficial plastering of artifice scarce of art; and all is represented to us colored by a peculiar light which never came from sun, or moon, or stars. One thing we lack which the ancients possessed-simplicity. All our work is done consciously; each puny mind "knows its own power;". Heaven save the mark!—each virtue gazes at herself in the glass, and smiles, and nods, and cries "How fair I am!" bidding the world admire her as she stands. Nothing of the child is left us; nothing of unconscious greatness, of ingenuous simplicity; nothing of that graceful goodness from its own inward impulse, and not because "'t is well to be virtuous, the neighbours praise; " nothing of modesty of thought, of reverence, of silence from awe. Out to the whole world must each deepest mystery be displayed! Showered down as tinsel-rags of what was once the covering of a temple; showered down, that a mob may clothe itself therewith, ignorant of the worth or the intention of those fluttering rags!

We would not have truth closed in from any. No, not that; but we would have mysteries held in reverence; the unknown spoken of in whispers, not thundered forth with blare of trumpets and a clown's rude jests, exhibited for gold

to an audience all unfitted to receive it. We would have the holy things of life treated of in all holiness, and its great secrets searched for in all stillness and religious awe. We would keep close the door of the Adytum, until the God could be understood of by his worshippers, and we would not leave the temple free to the pollutions of a mindless rabble. We would scarce arm a child with the hero's weapons, lest they turn to his own destruction not defence. We would look back lovingly and oft, and we would learn the lessons which the past breathes out.

And all this we would do, free of thought, wide of faith, piñodnμos, as we are! An education which begins with the book, and not the alphabet, and a temple built from the top downwards, are things which Michael Scott's familiar would liken unto "twisting ropes out of seasand," and Socrates would say, were as vain and null as to "boil stones in a chytra." Yet what but this is it, when the results of a long apprenticeship, and of a tedious education, are laid before the unformed mind, and it is bid to learn? The ancients understood these things better, and they portioned out their intellectual food in such rations as were fit for their recipients. They knew human nature well; and admirably they adapted all they knew, framing lessons, not for a day, but for all time. It is curious to trace out the different parts of humanity, which different nations more particularly enshrined. With some it was physical nature; with others beauty of form; with a third, mental truths; with a fourth, social virtues. Take, as an instance, the Egyptian and the Grecian. Their sculptures stand side by side in our galleries, and their religions rank near together in our learnings. And yet how different they were! - and how truly each expressed the forming idea which had moulded it! The Egyptian cared little for the phenomena of physical nature, embodying, in his own way, the spiritual, the metaphysical, and esoteric alone. The Hellene seized on all that the outward had to offer; making this the type of the supersensual, in contradistinction to that creed which held spirit as wholly apart from sense, and looked on images only as media of communication, no matter what their unlikeness or unfitness. His religion was essentially human; spiritual only so far as manhood can be idealized, but not spiritual, as freed from any necessity of connection with sense. The Egyptian united the two matter and spirit; but in a clumsy, unharmonious fashion. His figures were mere letters, not types—an alphabet by which to read, not a mirror wherein to study. The Greek, on the contrary, gave the greater worth and weight to form and sense; and so has made himself the companion of all generations,

These words might startle many-"subjected more to sensation than to thought" and many there are who would start up indignantly to deny them, and to assert the supreme dominion of the mind-the ideal. Ah, well! they are ghastly words—but they are true; true, in spite of that pretty, but untenable philosophy, by which every man who has his share of intellect, disdains to be other than spiritual, æsthetic, beyond and above the influence of coarse rude sense —a being of all angelic attributes, but no man of blood, and nerves, and appetites! Folly of all follies! - as if sensation were a crime ! affections a degradation! — as if to love, were to be wanting in dignity of manhood! — as if to feel, were to be wanting in the intention of life! It is the fashion of the day; and the ban on the opposer of this fashion is the dreaded cry-Materialism. It will pass, as the fashion of burning witches in the market-place; as all fashions which have not nature and common sense for their bases, must inevitably pass away into nothingness!

The Greek showed his intimate knowledge of human nature in nothing more clearly than in the characters of his Gods. In Egypt, India, China wherever there is a sensuous polytheism—though we find different and appropriate attributes, we do not find such varied and entire human characters as in Greece. More or less, the impersonations of other mythologies are unnatural; in this, they are the very perfections of humanity—the men and women met with in daily life, but refined into an ideal beauty, to which simple manhood cannot attain. A few exceptions of the early theogonies, or of the mystic adaptations brought from the East, war against the more cultivated taste of the age; but they are only a few. Thus, the Ephesian Artemis was never of the same thought as that which created the Athene of the Parthenon, and the sedent Olympian Zeus at Elis. But the Grecian mythology seldom admitted any thing foreign to the laws of beauty; for their whole divinity was nought but manhood beautiful and idealized, till by this very excess of loveliness, it became godlike.

How true to human nature, in particulars, not only in generals, were those Gods of Greece let their characters themselves declare! We have met them face to face many a time and oft. History speaks of them, and poetry reproduces them, not as Gods, but as loving and as suffering men. Our Calendar of Saints holds many a copy of those Olympian antitypes; our Chronicles of Chivalry repeat their stories; and the heroes of old — the demi-gods who stood be

the tourney, the battle-field, the war-ship, in the past and in the present of modern history! While the feats of Abd-el-Kader, and the name of the Rajah of Sarawak, are known to us as truths, let us not reject the heroic mythes of Greece, nor the names of her godlike men!

As one instance, among many, of the intimate likeness between the Gods and the worshippers of Hellas in their mutual keen sensations, high beauty, and ardent natures we will take Hera, or, as we, in our barbarous habit of latinizing the Grecian names, would call her, Juno. Trace her nature throughout, and look upon her form, as Polycleitos gave it to Mycenæ, and surely we shall find that many a dame, actual now and living, might wear the portrait of the sister spouse of Zeus! Look upon that broad majestic brow, which shows so well beneath the glossy tresses, plainly gathered round, to fall upon her marble shoulders in loose masses of waving curl; and there, through all its dignity and awful majesty, we see the imperious woman to the full as plainly as the unapproachable Goddess! A stephanos, or tiara-shaped crown binds the snowy veil upon her head, which descends in a graceful majesty of fold and disposition to encompass her pillar-like throat, and to shade her proud and faultless breast. Her arms, firm, rounded, and uncovered, are adorned with bands of gold; and her drapery, the long Ionic chiton or under-dress- the diploidion or boddice, both of which are confined by a girdle concealed in the overhanging plaits — and the peplos, or shawl, flow round her in those broad deep folds, which suit her dignity so well; folds which no art could arrange upon the person of a fair petite and piquant blonde. See her haughty indignation, as she meets her faithless spouse, when he returns with his serene hypocrisy from some of his stolen loves—it has nothing vulgar, nothing coarse; but how terrible it is, in the intensity of its proud and withering wrath! Hear her voice, not shrill or shrewish, but like the deep murmurs of the winds before the coming storm, telling of such stern and ruthless anger; and she, the while, so dignified in her resentment, never forgetting the superiority which her knowledge of her husband's failings has given her-never descending from the position of insulted pride to the gentler place of forgiveness, love, and mercy! Well may Zeus tremble before her, guilty as he is! well may he purchase peace at almost any sacrifice, so that he hears no more of that dread and welldeserved rebuke - which stands him instead of the mortal's morning head-ache-his concessions, the hock and the soda-water that shall cure him!