You know I told you the Lord of all labor by which man lived was
Hephæstus; therefore Athena adopts a child of his, and of the Earth,--
Erichthonius,--literally, "the tearer up of the ground," who is the head
(though not in direct line) of the kings of Attica; and, having adopted
him, she gives him to be brought up by the three nymphs of the dew. Of
these, Aglauros, the dweller in the fields, is the envy or malice of the
earth; she answers nearly to the envy of Cain, the tiller of the ground,
against his shepherd brother, in her own envy against her two sisters,
Herse, the cloud dew, who is the beloved of the shepherd Mercury; and
Pandrosos, the diffused dew, or dew of heaven. Literally, you have in
this myth the words of the blessing of Esau: "Thy dwelling shall be of
the fatness of the earth, and of the dew of heaven from above." Aglauros
is for her envy turned into a black stone; and hers is one of the voices
--the other being that of Cain--which haunts the circle of envy in the
Purgatory:

"Io sono Aglauro, chi divenne sasso."

But to her two sisters, with Erichthonius (or the hero Erectheus), is
built the most sacred temple of Athena in Athens; the temple to their own
dearest Athena--to her, and to the dew together; so that it was divided
into two parts: one, the temple of Athena of the city, and the other that
of the dew. And this expression of her power, as the air bringing the
dew to the hill pastures, in the central temple of the central city of
the heathen, dominant over the future intellectual world, is, of all the
facts connected with her worship as the spirit of life, perhaps the most
important. I have no time now to trace for you the hundredth part of the
different ways in which it bears both upon natural beauty, and on the
best order and happiness of men's lives. I hope to follow out some of
these trains of thought in gathering together what I have to say about