But, reader, let us go to Eleusis, and see, for ourselves, this great festival.  Suppose it to be the 15th of September, B.C. 411, Anno Mundi 3593 (though we would not make oath to that).  It is a fine morning at Athens, and every one is astir, for it is the day of assembling together at Eleusis.  Then, for company, we shall have Plato, now eighteen years old, Sophocles, an old man of eighty-four, Euripides, at sixty-nine, and Aristophanes, at forty-five.  Socrates, who has his peculiar notions about things, is not one of the initiated, but will go with us, if we ask him.  These are the elite of Athens.  Then there are the Sophists and their young disciples, and the vast crowd of the Athenian people.  Some of the oldest among them may have seen and heard the “Prometheus Vinctus”; certainly very many of them have seen “Antigone,” and “Oedipus,” and “Electra”; and all of them have heard the Rhapsodists.  Great wonders have they seen and heard, which, in their appeal to the heart, transcend all the wonders of this nineteenth century.  Not more fatal to the poor Indian was modern civilization, bringing swift ruin to his wigwam and transforming his hunting-grounds into the sites of populous cities, than modern improvements would have been to the Greek.  Modern strategy!  What a subject for Homer would the siege of Troy have been, had it consisted of a series of pitched battles with rifles!  Railways, steamboats, and telegraphs, annihilating space and time, would also have annihilated the Argonautic expedition and the wanderings of Ulysses.  There would have been little fear, in a modern steamship, of the Sirens’ song; one whistle would have broken the charm.  A modern steamship might have borne Ulysses to Hades,—­but it would never have brought him back, as his own ship did.  And now do you think a ride to Eleusis by railway to-day would strike this Athenian populace, to say nothing of the philosophers and poets we have along with us?

But they are thinking of Eleusis, and not of the way to Eleusis; so that we may as well keep our suggestion to ourselves,—­also those pious admonitions which we were just about to administer to our companions on heathenish superstitions.  A strange fascination these Athenians have; and before we are aware, our thoughts, too, are centred in Eleusis, whither are tending, not Athens only, but vast multitudes from all Greece.  Their movement is tumultuous; but it is a tumult of natural enthusiasm, and not of Bacchic frenzy.  If Athens be, as Milton calls her, “the eye of Greece,” surely Eleusis must be its heart!

There are nine days of the festival.  This first is the day of the agurmos, ([Greek:  agyrmos],) or assembling together the flux of Grecian life into the secret chambers of its Eleusinian heart.  To-morrow is the day of purification; then, “To the sea, all ye that are initiated!” ([Greek:  Alade, mystai!]) lest any come with the stain of impurity to the mysteries of God.  The third day is the