“Oh! nobility!  Oh! true and simple beauty!  Goddess, the worship of whom signifies reason and wisdom, thou whose temple is an eternal lesson of conscience and truth, I come late to the threshold of thy mysteries; I bring to the foot of thy altar much remorse.  Ere finding thee, I have had to make infinite search.  The initiation which thou didst confer by a smile upon the Athenian at his birth I have acquired by force of reflection and long labour.

“I am born, O goddess of the blue eyes, of barbarian parents, among the good and virtuous Cimmerians who dwell by the shore of a melancholy sea, bristling with rocks ever lashed by the storm.  The sun is scarcely known in this country, its flowers are seaweed, marine plants, and the coloured shells which are gathered in the recesses of lonely bays.  The clouds seem colourless, and even joy is rather sorrowful there; but fountains of fresh water spring out of the rocks, and the eyes of the young girls are like the green fountains in which, with their beds of waving herbs, the sky is mirrored.

“My forefathers, as far as we can trace them, have passed their lives in navigating the distant seas, which thy Argonauts knew not, I used to hear as a child the songs which told of voyages to the Pole; I was cradled amid the souvenir of floating ice, of misty seas like milk, of islands peopled with birds which now and again would warble, and which, when they rose in flight, darkened the air.

“Priests of a strange creed, handed down from the Syrians of Palestine, brought me up.  These priests were wise and good.  They taught me long lessons of Cronos, who created the world, and of his son, who, as they told me, made a journey upon earth.  Their temples are thrice as lofty as thine, O Eurhythmia, and dense like forests.  But they are not enduring, and crumble to pieces at the end of five or six hundred years.  They are the fantastic creation of barbarians, who vainly imagine that they can succeed without observing the rules which thou hast laid down, O Reason!  Yet these temples pleased me, for I had not then studied thy divine art and God was present to me in them.  Hymns were sung there, and among those which I can remember were:  ’Hail, star of the sea....  Queen of those who mourn in this valley of tears ...’ or again, ’Mystical rose, tower of ivory, house of gold, star of the morning....’  Yes, Goddess, when I recall these hymns of praise my heart melts, and I become almost an apostate.  Forgive me this absurdity; thou canst not imagine the charm which these barbarians have imparted to verse, and how hard it is to follow the path of pure reason.