Meru, Kaf, Olympus, Elboorz,--they are
all alike. The ethnic superior daemons were well termed the powers of
the air. Upward into the far blue gazes the weary and longing saint and
devotee of every faith. Beyond the azure curtains of the sky, upward
into the pure realm, over the rain-cloud and the thunder and the silver
bars of the scirrhus, he places his quiet seats, his mansions of rest.
The German poet, Schiller, who was a worshipper of Art and sensualistic
beauty, and who regarded the sciences as the mere handmaids of Art,
exalting the aesthetic above the moral nature in man, quite naturally
regretted that he had not lived in the palmy days of the
anthropomorphic creed of Hellas, before the dirge of Pan was chanted in
the Isle of Naxos. His "Gods of Greek Land" is as fine a piece of
heathenish longing as could well be written at so late a day. His heart
was evidently far away from the century in which he lived, and pulsated
under that distant Grecian sky of which he somewhere speaks. For
artistic purposes the myths of Greece formed a glorious faith. Grace
and symmetry of form were theirs, and they satiated the eye with
outward loveliness; but to the deep fountains of feeling and sentiment,
such as a higher faith has unsealed in the heart, they never
penetrated.
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