The office of the imagination, then, in Greek sculpture, in its handling of divine persons, is thus to condense the impressions of natural things into human form; to retain that early mystical sense of water, or wind, or light, in the [33] moulding of eye and brow; to arrest it, or rather, perhaps, to set it free, there, as human expression. The body of man, indeed, was for the Greeks, still the genuine work of Prometheus; its connexion with earth and air asserted in many a legend, not shaded down, as with us, through innumerable stages of descent, but direct and immediate; in precise contrast to our physical theory of our life, which never seems to fade, dream over it as we will, out of the light of common day. The oracles with their messages to human intelligence from birds and springs of water, or vapours of the earth, were a witness to that connexion. Their story went back, as they believed, with unbroken continuity, and in the very places where their later life was lived, to a past, stretching beyond, yet continuous with, actual memory, in which heaven and earth mingled; to those who were sons and daughters of stars, and streams, and dew; to an ancestry of grander men and women, actually clothed in, or incorporate with, the qualities and influences of those objects; and we can hardly over-estimate the influence on the Greek imagination of this mythical connexion with the natural world, at not so remote a date, and of the solemnising power exercised thereby over their thoughts. In this intensely poetical situation, the historical Greeks, the Athenians of the age of Pericles, found themselves; it was as if the actual roads on which men daily walk, went up and on, into a visible wonderland.