“What a God-send is a Napoleon!” exclaimed CHARLES WHEELER; “let us pray for scores of such, that a new and superior mythos may arise for us!” Is it malicious to suspect a subtle irony turned against the sacred person of R. W. E. in this speech? MARGARET retorted indignantly that if they came, _we_ should do nothing better than write memoirs of their hats, coats, and swords, as we had done already, without thinking of any lesson they might teach. She could not see why we were not content to take the beautiful Greek mythi as they were, without troubling ourselves about those which might arise for us! R. W. E. acknowledged that the Greeks had a quicker perception of the beautiful than we. Their genius lay in the material expression of it. If we knew the real meaning of the names of their Deities, the story would take to flight. We should have only the working of abstract ideas as we might adjust them for ourselves. MARGARET said that a fable was more than a mere word. It was a word of the purest kind rather, the passing of thought into form. R. W. E. had made no allowance for time or space or climate, and there was a want of truth in that. The age of the Greeks was the age of Poetry; ours was the age of Analysis. _We_ could not create a Mythology. EMERSON asked, “Why not? We had still better material.” MARGARET said, irrelevantly as it seemed to me, that Carlyle had attempted to deduce new principles from present history, and that was the reason he did not _respect_ the _respectable_. EMERSON said Carlyle was unfortunate in his figures, but we might have mythology as beautiful as the Greek. MARGARET thought each age of the world had its own work to do. The transition of thought into form marked the Greek period. It was most easily done through fable, on account of their intense perception of beauty. EMERSON pursued his own train of thought. He seemed to forget that we had come together to pursue Margaret’s. He said it was impossible that men or events should _stand out_ in a population of twenty millions as they could from a population of a single million, to which the whole population of the ancient world could hardly have amounted. As Hercules stood to Greece, no modern man could ever stand in relation to his own world. MARGARET thought Hercules and Jupiter quite different creations. The first _might_ have been a deified life. The second could not. CHARLES WHEELER said that R. W. E.’s view carried no historical obligation of belief with it. We could not deny the heroic origin of the Greek demigods, but the highest dynasty was the exponent of translated thought. SOPHIA RIPLEY asked if the life of an individual fitly interwoven with her experience was not as fine a Poem as the story of Ceres, her wanderings and her tears? Did not Margaret know such lives? R. W. E. thought every man had probably met his Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Venus, or Ceres in society! MARGARET was sure she never had!