A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. III.--JANUARY, 1859.--NO. XV.
OLYMPUS AND ASGARD.
How remote from the nineteenth century of the Christian era lies the
old Homeric world! By the magic of the Ionian minstrel's verse that
world is still visible to the inner eye. Through the clouds and murk of
twenty centuries and more, it is still possible to catch clear glimpses
of it, as it lies there in the golden sunshine of the ancient days. A
thousand objects nearer in the waste of past time are far more muffled,
opaque, and impervious to vision. As you enter it through the gates of
the "Ilias" and "Odusseia," you bid a glad adieu to the progress of the
age, to railroads and telegraph-wires, to cotton-spinning, (there might
have been some of that done, however, in some Nilotic Manchester or
Lowell,) to the diffusion of knowledge and the rights of man and
societies for the improvement of our race, to humanitarianism and
philanthropy, to science and mechanics, to the printing-press and
gunpowder, to industrialism, clipper-ships, power-looms, metaphysics,
geology, observatories, light-houses, and a myriad other things too
numerous for specification,--and you pass into a sunny region of
glorious sensualism, where there are no obstinate questionings of
outward things, where there are no blank misgivings of a creature
moving about in worlds not realized, no morbid self-accusings of a
morbid methodistic conscience.
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