though it be in the ashes of material conceptions. Not, indeed, life in any true sense, but faculties of perception and animation are his to give to the works of his hands. His forge can turn out intelligent automata. Among its products are golden handmaidens,[363] conscious without being self-conscious, endowed with all the useful attributes, while devoid of the inconveniences of personality. Their efficiency was purely altruistic; they acted, but neither sought nor suffered. The bellows, too, of the great Iliadic armourer could be left to blow at discretion; and his wheeled tripods repaired to, and withdrew from, the assembly of the gods, at fit times, unsummoned and undismissed. This lingering of the creative tradition, completely dissociated from the mighty Zeus, about the misshapen nursling of Thetis, illustrates his connexion with Pthah, the creative and at the same time the metallurgical deity of the Nile-valley. Footnote 363: Ilmarine, the Finnish Hephæstus, made himself a wife of gold. The Teutonic Wieland sprang from the same mythological stock. He could, however, lay claim to no trait of divinity, but was merely an artist of supreme skill, taught by subterranean pygmies. He was lamed by King Nidung, an early art-patron, eager for a monopoly of his services; but eventually escaped by means of a flying-apparatus of his own construction, his maladroit brother Ægil barely escaping the fate of Icarus. Here, then, Wieland merges into Dædalus, who is only once mentioned by Homer, and that as a builder. In a passage full of the ‘local colour’ of Crete, he is said to have constructed the ‘chorus,’ or dancing-place of Ariadne.[364] The dream of a levitative art lurked nowhere within the Homeric field of view. Least of all had it been mastered by the ‘eternal smith’ of Olympus, who owed his life-long infirmity to the want of a parachute. His ‘summer’s day’ fall from the ‘crystal battlements’ of Olympus ‘on Lemnos, th’ Ægean isle,’ crippled him incurably; and his return thither was effected by other than aeronautic means. But the story of his alliance with Dionysus is not Homeric, so we have nothing to do with it. Footnote 364: _Iliad_, xviii. 592. Still less Homeric is the comparatively late account of his localisation in the Lipari Islands: Vulcani domus, et Vulcania nomine tellus.