What a poor, narrow little world was that myth-haunted one
of the Grecian poet and sculptor, and even philosopher, compared with
the actual world which modern science is revealing from year to year!
What a puny affair was that Grecian sun, with its coachman's apparatus
of reins, fire-breathing nags, and golden car, which Schiller looks
back to, in the spirit of Mr. Weller, Senior, when compared with the
vast empyreal sphere and light-fountain of modern science, with its
retinue of planets, ships of space, freighted with souls! Science the
handmaid of Art! Well might the mere artist and worshipper of
anthropomorphic beauty shrink appalled, and sigh for a lodge under some
low Grecian heaven and in the bosom of some old myth-peopled Nature, as
he trembled before the apocalypses of modern sidereal science, which
has dropped its plummet to unimaginable depths through the nebulous
abysses of space, shoaled with systems of worlds as the sea is with its
finny droves. The Nature and the Physical Universe of the old ethnic
Greek formed only a little niche and recess, on the walls of which the
puny human image was easily reflected in beautiful and picturesque and
grotesque shadows, which were mistaken for gods.
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