l play and conceit with these involuntary fellowships,--we
fall necessarily into the curious web of hesitating sentiment,
pathetic fallacy, and wandering fancy, which form a great part of our
modern view of nature. But the Greek never removed his god out of
nature at all; never attempted for a moment to contradict his
instinctive sense that God was everywhere. "The tree _is_ glad," said
he, "I know it is; I can cut it down: no matter, there was a nymph in
it. The water _does_ sing," said he; "I can dry it up; but no matter,
there was a naiad in it." But in thus clearly defining his belief,
observe, he threw it entirely into a human form, and gave his faith to
nothing but the image of his own humanity. What sympathy and
fellowship he had, were always for the spirit _in_ the stream, not for
the stream; always for the dryad _in_ the wood, not for the wood.
Content with this human sympathy, he approached the actual waves and
woody fibres with no sympathy at all. The spirit that ruled them, he
received as a plain fact. Them, also, ruled and material, he received
as plain facts; they, without their spirit, were dead enough. A rose
was good for scent, and a stream for sound and coolness; for the rest,
one was no more than leaves, the other no more than water; he could
not make anything else of them; and the divine power, which was
involved in their existence, having been all distilled away by him
into an independent Flora or Thetis, the poor leaves or waves were
left, in mere cold corporealness, to make the most of their being
discernibly red and soft, clear and wet, and unacknowledged in any
other power whatsoever.

Then, observe farther, the Greeks lived in the midst of the most
beautiful nature, and were as familiar with blue sea, clear air, and
sweet outlines of mountain, as we are with brick walls, black smoke,
and level fields. This perfect familiarity rendered all such scenes of
natural beauty unexciting, if not indifferent to them, by lulling and
overwearying the imagination as far as it was concerned with such
things; but there was another kind of beauty which they found it
required effort to obtain, and which, when thoroughly obtained, seemed
more glorious than any of this wild loveliness--the beauty of the
human countenance and form. This, they perceived, could only be
reached by continual exercise of virtue; and it was in Heaven's sight,
and theirs, all the more beautiful because it needed this self-denial
to obta