‘His thyrsus holds—­an ivy-crowned spear.’

Does not the gentle Euripides show us the god, ’his horned head with dragon wreath entwined?’ And those two sacred horns point back to the dread mysteries of the Ogdoad sublime,

  ‘The great Cabiri of earth’s dawning prime.’

They trace with lines that never swerve from truth the history of the primeval world, the early days of Noah and his ark.  They recall to us the old story of life and suffering, of deluge and salvation; on their crescent points hangs the eternal principle of the efficacy of sacrifice.  They float with the moon-ark of Astarte Mylitta on hyacinthine seas of night-clouds, and their high import, dimmed and lost in the great stream of Time, rises again in the ages, uncrowned with the early luxuriance of symbol and mystery.  The mystic horns appear over the brow of the queenly Sappho of Grillparzer, upon whose hair

  ’Rested the diadem, like the pale moon
  Upon the brow of night, a silver crest;’

and the white-robed Madonna, with child-like face upraised, and deep, tender eyes uplifted, yet rests her slender, sandaled foot upon the horned moon, floating below her in misty clouds.

A hiatus for which we crave indulgence; a dream, and yet not all a dream, for each of these old types encloses a living truth, and unfolds into a history, tangled, perhaps, and imperfect, but suggestive and reliable, of races and religions that had else passed away into oblivion.  And the earnest student of the present, or the historian of the past, can never disregard these dim old treasures, but must draw from them a fresher faith in his own humanity and in the eternal laws of God, that are unchangeable as he is immortal.

The art of history advances with the art of poetry; both, and indeed all literature, correspond aesthetically with the manners, customs, theology, and politics of the nation of their birth.  The severe grandeur of Thucydides, the invariable sweetness of Xenophon, and the cheerful elegance of Herodotus, recall, with their just conceptions of harmony, their noble and sustained flow of thought, and their freedom from the adventitious ornaments of an exaggerated rhetoric or a sentimental morality, the golden age of Greece.  We seem to stand within the Parthenon, to gaze upon the Venus of Cnidus, to be jostled by the gay crowd at the Olympic games.  It was indeed a golden age, when all that was beautiful in nature was reverently and assiduously nurtured, and all that was noble and natural in art was magnificently encouraged; an age in which refinement and nobility were not accidents, but necessities; when politics had reached the high grade of an art, and oratory attained a beauty and power beyond which no Pitt, Canning, or Brougham has ever yet aspired; an age when the gifted Aspasia held her splendid court, and Alcibiades and Socrates were proud to sit at the Milesian’s feet; when Pericles, who ’well deserved the lofty title of Olympian,’ lived and ruled:  the golden age when Socrates thought and taught, bearing in its bosom the guilty day when Socrates died.