Dionysus came later than the other gods to the centres of Greek life; and, as a consequence of this, he is presented to us in an earlier stage of development than they; that element of natural fact which is the original essence of all mythology being more unmistakeably impressed upon us here than in other myths. Not the least interesting point in the study of him is, that he illustrates very clearly, not only the [30] earlier, but also a certain later influence of this element of natural fact, in the development of the gods of Greece. For the physical sense, latent in it, is the clue, not merely to the original signification of the incidents of the divine story, but also to the source of the peculiar imaginative expression which its persons subsequently retain, in the forms of the higher Greek sculpture. And this leads me to some general thoughts on the relation of Greek sculpture to mythology, which may help to explain what the function of the imagination in Greek sculpture really was, in its handling of divine persons. That Zeus is, in earliest, original, primitive intention, the open sky, across which the thunder sometimes sounds, and from which the rain descends--is a fact which not only explains the various stories related concerning him, but determines also the expression which he retained in the work of Pheidias, so far as it is possible to recall it, long after the growth of those later stories had obscured, for the minds of his worshippers, his primary signification. If men felt, as Arrian tells us, that it was a calamity to die without having seen the Zeus of Olympia; that was because they experienced the impress there of that which the eye and the whole being of man love to find above him; and the genius of Pheidias had availed to shed, upon the gold and ivory of the physical form, the blandness, the breadth, the smile of the open sky; the mild [31] heat of it still coming and going, in the face of the father of all the children of sunshine and shower; as if one of the great white clouds had composed itself into it, and looked down upon them thus, out of the midsummer noonday: so that those things might be felt as warm, and fresh, and blue, by the young and the old, the weak and the strong, who came to sun themselves in the god's presence, as procession and hymn rolled on, in the fragrant and tranquil courts of the great Olympian temple; while all the time those people consciously apprehended in the carved image of Zeus none but the personal, and really human, characteristics.