Sparta, it is true, appreciated highly the blessings of liberty, and was not only content by a joyless existence to purchase this, but delighted even to sacrifice life for its preservation. But the refined capital of Minerva went beyond the severe law which makes a useful slave, as one would harden a growth of oak; she elicited perfume from the fairest bloom of the soul, wherein the moral man was made to unfold in the development of a higher freedom. The genius of the Greek was as profoundly devotional as it was emulative. To his sensitive imagination, the fair objects of nature became invested with a living personality; day and night presented engrossing deities, while he adored the golden-haired Phœbus, or the silvery Artemis. Actuated by a glowing fancy, material creation seemed spiritualized, and each agreeable retreat was the habitation of a god. Naiads in the fountains; Dryads in the groves; Fauns, Satyrs, and Oreads on the mountains, indissolubly associated sublunary scenes with intelligent beings, and kindled the starry heavens with the effulgence of supreme divinities. The dawn of civilization has ever been confined to those who were intrusted with the care of sacred ceremonies, and who devoted their exclusive knowledge to the support of their religion. In the beginning all contemplation was religious; the whole universe was esteemed divine, and it was to the solving of this problem that the first efforts of mind were given. "Whence, and who am I?" are the first questions which occur to Brahma, as represented in Hindoo theology, when he awakens to conscious being amid the expanse of waters. But the early Greek sages surveyed nature with the more penetrating glance of a Lynceus, or Atlas, who saw down into the ocean depths. There was no distinct astronomy, history, philosophy, or theology; there was but one mental exercise, whose results were called "Wisdom." It was this personification that Solomon saw standing alone with God before the creation. All mythologies may in one sense claim to rank as truths, inasmuch as they in fact represent what once existed as mental conceptions. On this principle the Grecian dogmas, though in reality absurdities, are most worthy of attention, because they are expressed in the purest forms. Their conceptions of super-human beings were products of the devotional sentiment. Nature was to them a perpetually flowing fountain, whose pellucid waters mirrored earth and sky; like the stream in which Narcissus was dazzled by the reflection of his own image, and beneath whose surface he bent in sadness, and was melted into its transparent depths.