forth sweet flowers,--when such a presence manifested herself on the
field of human strife on an errand of motherly affection, and attempted
to screen her bleeding son from the shafts of his foes with a fold of
her shining _peplum_, surely the audacious Grecian king should have
forborne, and, lowering his lance, should have turned his wrath
elsewhere. But no,--he pierced her skin with his spear, so that,
shrieking, she abandoned her child, and was driven, bleeding, to her
immortal homestead. The rash earth-born warrior knew not that he who
put his lance in rest against the immortals had but a short lease of
life to live, and that his bairns would never run to lisp their sire's
return, nor climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Homer, in the first books of his "Ilias," permits us to glance into the
banqueting-hall of Olympus. The two regular pourers of nectar, to wit,
Hebe and Ganymede, are off duty. Hephaestus the Cripple has taken their
place; and as he halts about from guest to guest, inextinguishable
laughter arises among the gods at his awkward method of "passing the
rosy." His lameness was owing to that sunset fall on the isle of Lemnos
from the threshold of heaven. So, all day long, says the poet, they
revelled, Apollo and the Muses performing the part of a ballet-troop.
It is pleasing to learn that the Olympians kept early hours,
conforming, in this respect, to the rule of Poor Richard. Duly at set
of sun they betook themselves to their couches. Zeus himself slept, and
by his side Herè of the Golden Throne.

Who would wish to have lived a pagan under that old Olympian
dispensation, even though, like the dark-eyed Greek of the Atreidean
age, his fancy could have "fetched from the blazing chariot of the Sun
a beardless youth who touched a golden lyre and filled the illumined
groves with ravishment"?--even though, like him, he might in