r side
as friends! And yet.... are these old stories credible, pious, even
modest? Does not my heart revolt from them? Who has shared more than I
in Plato's contempt for the foul deeds, the degrading transformations,
which Homer imputes to the gods of Greece? Must I believe them now? Must
I stoop to think that gods, who live in a region above all sense, will
deign to make themselves palpable to those senses of ours which are
whole aeons of existence below them? Degrade themselves to the base
accidents of matter? Yes! That, rather than nothing!.... Be it even so.
Better, better, better, to believe that Ares fled shrieking and wounded
from a mortal man--better to believe in Zeus's adulteries and Hermes's
thefts--than to believe that gods have never spoken face to face with
men! Let me think, lest I go mad, that beings from that unseen world for
which I hunger have appeared, and held communion with mankind, such
as no reason or sense could doubt--even though those beings were more
capricious and baser than ourselves! Is there, after all, an unseen
world? Oh for a sign, a sign!'

Haggard and dizzy, she wandered into her 'chamber of the gods'; a
collection of antiquities, which she kept there rather as matters of
taste than of worship. All around her they looked out into vacancy with
their white soulless eyeballs, their dead motionless beauty, those cold
dreams of the buried generations. Oh that they could speak, and set her
heart at rest! At the lower end of the room stood a Pallas, completely
armed with aegis, spear, and helmet; a gem of Athenian sculpture, which
she had bought from some merchants after the sack of Athens by the
Goths. There it stood severely fair; but the right hand, alas! was gone;
and there the maimed arm remained extended, as if in sad mockery of the
faith of which the body remained, while the power was dead and vanished.

She gazed long and passionately on the image of her favourite goddess,
the ideal to which she had longed for years to assimilate herself;
till--was it a dream? was it a frolic of the dying sunlight? or did
those lips really bend themselves into a smile?

Impossible! No, not impossible. Had not, only a few years before, the
image of Hecate smiled on a philosopher? Were there not stories of
moving images, and winking pictures, and all the material miracles by
which a dying faith strives desperately--not to deceive others--but to
persuade itself of its own sanity? It had been--it migh