hearts, not merely of poets or of artists, but of men and women
who suffered and who feared; the memory of them, fables though
they may have been, ennobled the old Greek heart; they ennobled
the heart of Europe in the fifteenth century, at the re-discovery
of Greek literature. So far from contradicting the Christian
ideal, they harmonised with--I had almost said they supplemented--
that more tender and saintly ideal of heroism which had sprung up
during the earlier Middle Ages. They justified, and actually gave
a new life to, the old noblenesses of chivalry, which had grown up
in the later Middle Ages as a necessary supplement of active and
manly virtue to the passive and feminine virtue of the cloister.
They inspired, mingling with these two other elements, a
literature both in England, France, and Italy, in which the three
elements, the saintly, the chivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have
become one and undistinguishable, because all three are human, and
all three divine; a literature which developed itself in Ariosto,
in Tasso, in the Hypnerotomachia, the Arcadia, the Euphues, and
other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes questionable, but
which reached its perfection in our own Spenser's "Fairy Queen"--
perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned by
mortal man.

And why? What has made these old Greek myths live, myths though
they be, and fables, and fair dreams? What--though they have no
body, and, perhaps, never had--has given them an immortal soul,
which can speak to the immortal souls of all generations to come?

What but this, that in them--dim it may be and undeveloped, but
still there--lies the divine idea of self-sacrifice as the
perfection of heroism, of self-sacrifice, as the highest duty and