Greece, born of the elements of the clime—autochthonous of that immortal ground! The Orientals, Egyptians, etc., bowed down to brutal shapes, congenial with the gross conceptions of their own laborious ignorance. But the Greek looked up, with a dignified sense of things—admired his own splendid symmetry in the olympic festivals, and, with a glorious egotism, invested the many manifestations of the universal spirit with the finest forms of men that ran or fought naked in the _palestræ_. Pan was no monstrous deity—he was a jolly rustic divinity—of the earth, earthy—a bucolic _bizarrerie_, coming naturally from the gay, gross genius of agrarianism; a little _caper_-footed, to be sure; but therefore only the more in character, and a very respectable divinity, indeed, for the country parts. Berenger, the French poet, fables that it was Cyprus wine which first gave birth to the gods of Greece—stating that Hesiod had warmed his veins with the liquor before he began to embody his Olympian theories. But Hesiod, after all, only transcribed and touched up the popular belief; it was the bright, sensuous genius of Greece, transfiguring the happy elements of the clime, that brought forth the theogonies—peopled with immortal dwellers the Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes, Beyond heaven’s constellated wilderness. The Greeks deified the best attributes of mankind, and adored the Supreme Spirit in the reflections of their own cheerful and elevated minds. In the vastness and power of the sea they saw Poseidon on his car, drawn by sea-horses, and girt by his conch-bearing Tritons, sounding in response to what the old Greek dramatist calls “the innumerable laughter of the waves”—_anarithmon kymaton gelasma_—Jupiter thundered from the acroceraunian top of Olympus, Soaring all snow-clad through his native sky In the wild pomp of mountain majesty; Phœbus-Apollo and Diana, his sister, moved, beautiful unspeakably, in the sun and moon; gods blew in the four great winds and in the breeze; every fountain had its Naiad, and every oak its Hamadryad. Pan shouted on the mountains—especially whenever good came to Greece; and on the day of Marathon his mighty vociferations were heard at wonderful distances!—and the Fauns, Satyrs, Dryads, Oreads and so forth, his subjects and followers, wandered over every meadow, and were seen peeping from the glades and openings of every forest.