grand Egyptian authority of leading away souls in the cloud of death (the actual dimness of sight caused by mortal wounds physically suggesting the darkness and descent of clouds, and continually being so described in the Iliad); while the sense of the need of guidance on the untrodden road follows necessarily.  You cannot but remember how this thought of cloud guidance, and cloud receiving souls at death, has been elsewhere ratified.

* I believe that the conclusions of recent scholarship are generally opposed to the Herodotean ideas of any direct acceptance by the Greeks of Egyptian myths:  and very certainly, Greek art is developed by giving the veracity and simplicity of real life to Eastern savage grotesque; and not by softening the severity of pure Egyptian design.  But it is of no consequence whether one conception was, or was not, in this case, derived from the other; my object is only to mark the essential difference between them.

26.  Without following that higher clue, I will pass to the lovely group of myths connected with the birth of Hermes on the Greek mountains.  You know that the valley of Sparta is one of the noblest mountain ravines in the world, and that the western flank of it is formed by an unbroken chain of crags, forty miles long, rising, opposite Sparta, to a height of 8,000 feet, and known as the chain of Taygetus.  Now, the nymph from whom that mountain ridge is named was the mother of Lacedaemon; therefore the mythic ancestress of the Spartan race.  She is the nymph Taygeta, and one of the seven stars of spring; one of those Pleiades of whom is the question to Job,—­“Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?” “The sweet influences of Pleiades,” of the stars of spring,—­nowhere sweeter than among the pine-clad slopes of the hills of Sparta and Arcadia, when he snows of their higher summits, beneath the sunshine of April, fell into fountains, and rose into clouds; and in every ravine was a newly awakened voice of waters,—­soft increase of whisper among its sacred stones; and on every crag its forming and fading veil of radiant cloud; temple above temple, of the divine marble that no tool can pollute, nor ruin undermine.  And, therefore, beyond this central valley, this great Greek vase of Arcadia, on the “hollow” mountain, Cyllene, or “pregnant” mountain, called also “cold,” because there the vapors rest,* and born of the eldest of those stars of spring, that Maia, from whom your own month of May has its name, bringing to you, in the green of her garlands, and the white of her hawthorn, the unrecognized symbols of the pastures and the wreathed snows of Arcadia, where long ago she was queen of stars:  there, first cradled and wrapt in swaddling-clothes; then raised, in a moment of surprise, into his wandering power,—­is born the shepherd of the clouds, winged-footed and deceiving,—­blinding the eyes of Argus,—­escaping from the grasp of Apollo—­restless messenger between the highest sky and topmost earth—­ “the herald Mercury, new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.”