And we are the more impressed by it when we consider the spots bewitched by the spell of Circe where it was exercised.  That persons dwelling in lonely, northern isles, where the long wash of the waves upon the shore, and the wild wail of the wind in mountain corries stimulated the imagination, and seemed like voices from another world, should see visions and dream dreams, does not surprise us.  The power of second sight may seem natural to spots where nature is mysterious and solemn, and full of change and sudden transitions from storm to calm and from sunshine to gloom.  But at Cumae there is a perpetual peace, an unchanging monotony.  The same cloudless sky overarches the earth day after day, and dyes to celestial blue the same placid sea that sleeps beside its shore.  The fields are drowsy at noon with the same stagnant sunshine; and the same purple glory lies at sunset on the entranced hills; and the olive and the myrtle bloom through the even months with no fading or brightening tint on leaf or stem; and each day is the twin of that which has gone before.  Nature in such a region is transparent.  No mist, or cloud, or shadow hides her secrets.  There is no subtle joy of despair and hope, of decay and growth, connected with the passing of the seasons.  In this Arcadian clime we should expect Nature to lull the soul into the sleep of contentment on her lap; and in its perpetual summer happy shepherds might sing eclogues for ever, and, satisfied with the present, have no hope or wish for the future.  How wonderful, then, that in such a charmed lotus-land we should meet with the mysterious unrest of soul, and the fixed onward look of the Sibyl to times widely different from her own.

And not only is this forward-looking gaze of the Sibyl contrary to what we should have expected in such a changeless land of beauty and ease; it is also contrary to what we should have expected from the paganism of the people.  It is characteristic of the Greek religion, as indeed of all heathen religions, that its golden age should be in the past.  It instinctively clings to the memory of a former happier time, and shrinks from the unknown future.  Its piety ever looks backward, and aspires to present safety or enjoyment by a faithful imitation of an imaginary past.  It is always “returning on the old well-worn path to the paradise of its childhood,” and contrasting the gloom that overhangs the present with the radiance that shone on the morning lands.  In every crisis of terror or disaster it turns with unutterable yearnings to the tradition of the happy age.  Or, if it does look forward to the future, it always pictures “the restoration of the old Saturnian reign”; it has no standard of future excellence or future blessedness to attain to, and no yearnings for consummation and perfection hereafter.  The very name given to the south of Italy was Hesperia, the “Land of the Evening Star,” as if in token of its exhausted history; and it was regarded as the scene of the fabled golden age from which Saturn