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.