“That low spot which men call earth,”

—­a glorious aerial 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 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