of ministry than the minor streams and seas, the highest cloud deity,
Hermes, has a rank more equal with Athena than Nereus or Proteus with
Neptune; and there is greater difficulty in tracing his character,
because his physical dominion over the clouds can, of course, be asserted
only where clouds are; and, therefore, scarcely at all in Egypt;* so that
the changes which Hermes undergoes in becoming a Greek from an Egyptian
and Phœnician god, are greater than in any other case of adopted
tradition In Egypt Hermes is a deity of historical record, and a
conductor of the dead to judgment; the Greeks take away much of this
historical function, assigning it to the Muses; but, in investing him
with the physical power over clouds, they give him that which the Muses
disdain,--the power of concealment and of theft. The snatching away by
the Harpies is with brute force; but the snatching away by the clouds
is connected with the thought of hiding, and of making things seem to
be what they are not; so that Hermes is the god of lying, as he is of
mist; and yet with this ignoble function of making things vanish and
disappear is connected the remnant of his grand Egyptian authority of
leading away souls in the cloud of death (the actual dimness of sight
caused by mortal wounds physically suggesting the darkness and descent
of clouds, and continually being so described in the Iliad); while the
sense of the need of guidance on the untrodden road follows necessarily.
You cannot but remember how this thought of cloud guidance, and cloud
receiving souls at death, has been elsewhere ratified.


* I believe that the conclusions of recent scholarship are generally
opposed to the Herodotean ideas of any direct acceptance by the Greeks
of Egyptian myths: and very certainly, Greek art is developed by giving
the veracity and simplicity of real life to Eastern savage grotesque; and
not by softening the severity of pure Egyptian design. But it is of no