... precibusque minas regaliter addit. ([Jove] royally adds threats to prayers.) Callisto _miles erat Phoebes_, _i. e._ a huntress. ... (neque enim coelestia tingi Ora decet lachrymis). (For it is not becoming that the faces of the celestials be tinged with tears,—keep a stiff upper lip.) How much more fertile a nature has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! The nature which inspired mythology still flourishes. Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted. The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East.[120] A more fertile nature than the Mississippi Valley. None of your four-hour nights for me. The wise man will take a fool’s allowance. The corn would not come to much if the nights were but four hours long. The soil in which those fables grew is deep and inexhaustible. * * * * * Lead cast by the Balearian sling:— Volat illud, et incandescit eundo; Et, quos non habuit, sub nubibus invenit ignes. (That flies and grows hot with going, And fires which it had not finds amid the clouds.) * * * * * I went some months ago to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to me,—made my ears tingle,—and each of which was the subject of a legend. There seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music as of crusaders departing for the Holy Land. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in history. I floated along through the moonlight of history under the spell of enchantment. It was as if I remembered a glorious dream,—as if I had been transported to a heroic age and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry. Those times appeared far more poetic and heroic than these. Soon after I went to see the panorama of the Mississippi, and as I fitly worked my way upward in the light of to-day, and saw the steamboats wooding up, and looked up the Ohio and the Missouri, and saw its unpeopled cliffs, and counted the rising cities,[121] and saw the Indians removing west across the stream, and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona’s Cliff,—still thinking more of the future than of the past or present,—I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind.[122] * * * * *