A famous passage from Ovid's "Metamorphoses"[4] represents Actaeon as changed into a stag; but, if I read the fable aright, the glimpse of Diana in her bath, while not an intelligent choice, was more than a mere accident--it was the uprising of innate sensuality; for even the Greek gods were supposed to have had senses. [Footnote 4: Addison's translation, Book III, pages 188-198.] "Actaeon was the first of all his race, Who grieved his grandsire in his borrowed face; Condemned by stern Diana to bemoan The branching horns and visage not his own; To shun his once-loved dogs, to bound away And from their huntsman to become their prey; And yet consider why the change was wrought; You'll find it his misfortune, not his fault; Or, if a fault it was the fault of chance; For how can guilt proceed from ignorance?" The story of Circe is the common story of those who have yielded to the flesh. The companions of Ulysses visited the palace of Circe, were allured by her charms, and the result is read in these words: "Before the spacious front, a herd we find Of beasts, the fiercest of the savage kind. Our trembling steps with blandishments they meet And fawn, unlike their species, at our feet." The strong words of Milton are none too strong: "Their human countenance The express resemblance of the gods, is changed Into some brutish form." A common subject with artists has been the temptations of the saints. They have fled from luxury, and what they supposed to be moral peril, but have found no solitude to which they could go and leave their bodies behind. In the silences faces have appeared to them full of alluring entreaty, and more than one anchorite has found to his sorrow that he carried within himself the cause of his danger. A singularly vivid painting represents one of the saints in the desert, and clinging to him, with their arms around his neck, are two figures of exquisite physical beauty. Their charms are so near and perilous that the pale and haggard man in desperation has shut his eyes, and in this extremity, with his one free hand, is frantically clinging to a cross. The artist has accurately depicted the condition in which the soul finds itself as it begins its growth;--its chief enemies are those of its own household. Happy indeed is it for all that none see at the first the obstacles in their way. Faint and far shines the splendor of the goal; the hindrances are reached one by one, and each one, for the moment, seems to be the last. But close and persistent as is the animal entail, it is not unconquerable. Many a Sir Galahad, and many a woman fair and holy as his pure sister, have lived on this earth of ours. They were not always so; and their beauty and holiness are but the outshining of spiritual victory.