the "Ilias" and "Odusseia," you bid a glad adieu to the progress of the
age, to railroads and telegraph-wires, to cotton-spinning, (there might
have been some of that done, however, in some Nilotic Manchester or
Lowell,) to the diffusion of knowledge and the rights of man and
societies for the improvement of our race, to humanitarianism and
philanthropy, to science and mechanics, to the printing-press and
gunpowder, to industrialism, clipper-ships, power-looms, metaphysics,
geology, observatories, light-houses, and a myriad other things too
numerous for specification,--and you pass into a sunny region of
glorious sensualism, where there are no obstinate questionings of
outward things, where there are no blank misgivings of a creature
moving about in worlds not realized, no morbid self-accusings of a
morbid methodistic conscience. All there in that old world, lit "by the
strong vertical light" of Homer's genius, is healthful,
sharply-defined, tangible, definite, and sensualistic. Even the divine
powers, the gods themselves, are almost visible to the eyes of their
worshippers, as they revel in their mountain-propped halls on the far
summits of many-peaked Olympus, or lean voluptuously from their
celestial balconies and belvederes, soothed by the Apollonian lyre, the
Heban nectar, and the fragrant incense, which reeks up in purple clouds
from the shrines of windy Ilion, hollow Lacedaemon, Argos, Mycenae,
Athens, and the cities of the old Greek isles, with their shrine-capped
headlands. The outlooks and watch-towers of the chief deities were all
visible from the far streets and dwellings of their earthly
worshippers, in that clear, shining, Grecian atmosphere. Uranography
was then far better understood than geography, and the personages
composing the heavenly synod were almost as definitely known to the
Homeric men as their mortal acquaintances. The architect of the
Olympian palaces was surnamed Amphiguëeis, or the Halt. The Homeric
gods were men divinized with imperishable frames, glorious and immortal