Homer placed the seat of the gods and the court of Zeus upon the summit of Olympus,[312] which was supposed to touch heaven, and piercing through the region of rain and cloud to reach into the calm ether, where reigned eternal spring. By later writers, however, Olympus was represented as an unsubstantial region overhead, with the palace of Zeus in its midst. The earlier view of Olympus exactly corresponds with the Chaldaean “mount of the world,” the mountain of Arallu or Hades, where the gods had their seat, and beneath which was the world of ghosts;[313] also with the Mount of the Assembly spoken of by Isaiah, and with the Scandinavian Asgard. But there is a clearer reminiscence of the elevated paradise of Oriental legend in the beautiful gardens of the world-supporting Atlas, with their delicious fruits, their golden apples, and their protecting dragon. The third conception of paradise, as the abode of the blessed, is also met with in Greek mythology in the Elysian fields, or islands of the blessed, also placed by some authorities in the neighbourhood of Mount Atlas. Here the souls of the virtuous enjoyed perfect happiness, in bowers for ever green, and amongst meadows watered by pleasant streams and bestarred with asphodel. The air was pure and serene, the birds warbled in the groves, and the inhabitants carried on such avocations as they had delighted in when on earth. Later writers, however, substituted for these innocent pleasures the voluptuous indulgences of the Mahometan paradise. It was, no doubt, the ancient tradition of an elevated paradise, of a paradise seated on the summit of a heaven-touching world-mountain, which influenced Milton in his celebrated description, for there is nothing in the Biblical account to suggest the excessive altitude that he so deliberately accentuates. Paradise, according to the poet— crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound, the champain head Of a steep wilderness, ... and overhead up-grew Insuperable height of loftiest shade, Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm; ... Yet higher than their tops The verdurous wall of paradise up-sprung. * * * * * And higher than that wall a circling row Of goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit.[314] As man’s conceptions of God have widened with a more extended knowledge of His universe and a fuller realisation of his own history on the earth, these older conceptions of paradise as the home of deity and the abode of the blessed have decayed, until at the present day, however much our theologians may differ in their descriptions of heaven, they agree at least in this, that whatever it is, it is not a garden. But the belief in the existence of an earthly paradise, which formed a part of the traditions of so many ancient nations, lingered on for centuries after “the Holy City” of the New Testament had displaced the Paradise of the Old.