Or turn the eye northward, and see the Persian preparing to descend from his mountains and conquer the world. Verdant valleys amidst sterile hills and sandy plains are his home, blazed over by a sun to whose bright orb he kneels in adoration as an emblem of the Deity. Hardy, handsome, chivalrous, luxurious, despotic, and ambitious,—yet animated by a spirit of justice, and by a religious belief so pure as at once to sympathise with that of the Hebrews, and to win for the Persian monarch the title of the “Servant of God;” they are the first in history to exhibit a nation, few in numbers, but strong in arms and wisdom, lording it over an immense tract of country, and over subjugated tribes—Syrians, Assyrians, Asiatic Greeks, and Egyptians—of divers origin and customs from themselves. The iron phalanx of Alexander at length caused this empire of satrapies to crumble into the dust; but under a new dynasty it revived again, so as to wage war successfully even with the all-conquering legions of Rome. Away, around the shores of the lovely Ægean—on the sunny slopes of Asia Minor, among the sparkling vine-clad islets of the Cyclades, and on the rocky, picturesque, bay-indented peninsula of Greece, the gay and martial Hellenic race disported themselves. As a race, young, imaginative, superstitious, and enamoured of the beautiful, they ascribed every phenomenon in nature to the action of a god—peopled the woods, the hills, the waters, with graceful imaginary beings sympathising with and often visible to man, and filling even the highest heaven with divinities who were gods but in power, and wholly men in passion. Keenly alive to pleasure, and hearing little of the deeper voices of the soul, their thoughts clung wholly to the beautiful world around them; and, while acknowledging the soul’s immortality, they ever looked upon Elysium, their world beyond the grave, as a shadowy land where joy becomes so diluted as hardly to be worth the having. The greatest poets the world ever saw, they embodied their conceptions, alike in literature, in architecture, and the plastic arts, in forms of such divine beauty, that after-ages have abandoned in despair even the hope of rivalling them. The story of Greece is not easily told; it excelled in so many departments of human effort—producing almost simultaneously an Alexander, a Socrates, a Plato, a Demosthenes, an Aristotle—not to speak of a Democritus, a Thales, an Anaxagoras, and others, in whose daring but vaguely-framed systems of the universe are to be found not a few brilliant anticipations of world-wide truth, which modern science is now recovering, and placing on the firm and only definite basis of experiment.