To be conversant with the arts of Greece, is to move among a race of gods endued with eternal youth. In the goddesses the small neck, the undeveloped bosom convey the idea of virgin innocence. The nipple shrinking inward retreats from the eye. Over the visage a radiance indescribable appears to play; the form, whether draped or undraped, suggests the idea of divine unfleeting existence—of the poetry of life and love—such as youth dreams of in its purest aspirations. For the gods our feelings are in a slight degree different. Zeus, invested with the majesty of Olympos, in the fulness of manhood, powerful, beautiful, sublime, awakens in us a mingling of reverence and love, as towards a father. Apollo towers like an elder brother above our heads. Hades, Poseidon, Ares are powers whom we do not love. Mighty they were, but strangers whom our sympathies do not cling to. But Dionysos, with his vine garland and beautiful face of friendship, with Eros and Heracles and the heroic twins and Hephæstos and Seilenos, and the Fauns, with every haunter of grove, or spring, or mountain seem familiar all and formed to inspire and repay affection. They are spirits of joy every one of them. They have lived from boyhood in our dreams, they have constituted one principal link in binding us to the past, one principal argument in favour of Grecian genius: and who can do otherwise than love them? Nay, in some measure, when we consider their manifold escapes from time and barbarism, they appear to us as Othello to Desdemona—we “love _them_ for the dangers they have passed,”—and it asks no faith in miracles to persuade us that they “love _us_ that we do pity them.”