A COTTAGE AT SHULAM. FIRST BROTHER OF THE SHULAMITE (_thinking of a younger sister whom he would sell when she is older._) We have a little sister, still immature. What shall we do with her when she is spoken for? SECOND BROTHER If by then she is comely, we will get for her silver from a palace. If she is not comely, we will get the value of cedar boards. THE SHULAMITE (_ironically intervening._) I am comely, yet I made them let me be. FIRST BROTHER (_significantly._) Solomon had a vineyard at Baal-hamon. He leased it to farmers each of whom was to pay him a thousand pieces of silver. THE SHULAMITE But my vineyard which is mine I still have. (_Laughing._) A thousand pieces for thee, Solomon, and two hundred for the others. (_At the door the_ SHEPHERD _appears. Behind him are comrades._) THE SHEPHERD Fair one, that dwelleth here, my companions hearken to thy voice, cause me to hear it. THE SHULAMITE Hasten to me, my beloved. Hasten like a roe or a young hart on the mountains of spices. III APHRODITE URANIA Greece had many creeds, yet but one religion. That was Beauty. Israel believed in hate, Greece in love. In Judæa the days of the righteous were long. In Greece they were brief. Whom the gods loved died young. The gods themselves were young. With the tribes that took possession of the Hellenic hills they came in swarms. Sprung from the depths of the archaic skies, they were sombre and impure. When they reached Olympus already their Asiatic masks had fallen. Hecate was hideous, Hephæstos limped, but among the others not an imperfection remained. Divested of attributes monstrous and enigmatic, they rejuvenated into divinities of joy. Homer said that their laughter was inextinguishable. He joined in it. So did Greece. The gayety of the immortals was appreciated by a people that counted their years by their games. As the tribes dispersed the gods advanced. Their passage, marked here by a temple, there by a shrine, had always the incense of legends. These Homer gathered and from them formed a Pentateuch in which dread was replaced by the ideal. Divinities, whom the Assyrian priests barely dared to invoke by name, and whose mention by the laity was forbidden, he displayed, luminous and indulgent, lifting, as he did so, the immense burden of mystery and fear under which humanity had staggered. Homer turned religion into art, belief into poetry. He evolved a creed that was more gracious than austere, more æsthetic perhaps than moral, but which had the signal merit of creating a serenity from which contemporaneous civilization proceeds. Greece to-day lies buried with her gods. She has been dead for twenty centuries and over. But the beauty of which she was the temple existed before death did and survived her.