accident coincide. Yet in Hellas, as in Italy, they assumed a shape
so thoroughly national and peculiar, that but little even of the
ancient common inheritance was preserved in a recognizable form, and
that little was for the most part misunderstood or not understood
at all. It could not be otherwise; for, just as in the peoples
themselves the great contrasts, which during the Graeco-Italian
period had lain side by side undeveloped, were after their division
distinctly evolved, so in their religion also a separation took
place between the idea and the image, which had hitherto been but
one whole in the soul. Those old tillers of the ground, when the
clouds were driving along the sky, probably expressed to themselves
the phenomenon by saying that the hound of the gods was driving
together the startled cows of the herd. The Greek forgot that the
cows were really the clouds, and converted the son of the hound
of the gods--a form devised merely for the particular purposes of
that conception--into the adroit messenger of the gods ready for
every service. When the thunder rolled among the mountains, he
saw Zeus brandishing his bolts on Olympus; when the blue sky again
smiled upon him, he gazed into the bright eye of Athenaea, the
daughter of Zeus; and so powerful over him was the influence of the
forms which he had thus created, that he soon saw nothing in them
but human beings invested and illumined with the splendour of
nature's power, and freely formed and transformed them according to
the laws of beauty. It was in another fashion, but not less strongly,
that the deeply implanted religious feeling of the Italian race
manifested itself; it held firmly by the idea and did not suffer
the form to obscure it. As the Greek, when he sacrificed, raised
his eyes to heaven, so the Roman veiled his head; for the prayer
of the former was contemplation, that of the latter reflection.
Throughout the whole of nature he adored the spiritual and the