s
when the world was young, there leaned to greet the men whose fancy
made them, forms imagined and yet real--human, divine--the
archetypes and everlasting patterns of man's deepest sense of what
is wonderful in nature. Feeling them there, for ever there,
inalienable, ready to start forth and greet successive
generations--as the Hamadryad greeted Rhaicos from his father's
oak--those mythopoets called them by immortal names. All their
pent-up longings, all passions that consume, all aspirations that
inflame--the desire for the impossible, which is disease, the
day-dreams and visions of the night, which are spontaneous
poems--were thus transferred to nature. And nature, responsive to
the soul that loves her, gave them back transfigured and translated
into radiant beings of like substance with mankind. It was thus, we
feel, upon these southern shores that the gods of Greece came into
being. The statues in the temples were the true fine flower of all
this beauty, the culmination of the poetry which it evoked in hearts
that feel and brains that think.

In Italy, far more than in any other part of Europe, the life of the
present is imposed upon the strata of successive past lives. Greek,
Latin, Moorish, and mediaeval civilisations have arisen, flourished,
and decayed on nearly the same soil; and it is common enough to find
one city, which may have perished twenty centuries ago, neighbour to
another that enjoyed its brief prosperity in the middle of our era.
There is not, for example, the least sign of either Greek or Roman
at Amalfi. Whatever may have been the glories of the republic in the
early middle ages, they had no relation to the classic past. Yet a
few miles off along the bay rise the ancient Greek temples of
Paestum, from a desert--with no trace of any intervening occupants.
Poseidonia was founded in the sixth century before Christ, by
colonists from Sybaris. Three centuries later the Hellenic element
in this settlement, which must already have become a town of no
little importance, was submerged by a deluge of recurrent barbarism.
Under the Roman rule it changed its name to Paestum, and was
prosperous. The Saracens destroyed it in the ninth century of our
era; and Robert Guiscard carried some of the materials of its
buildings to adorn his new town of Salerno. Since then the ancient
site has been abandoned to malaria and solitude. The very existence
of Paestum was unknown, except to wandering herdsmen and fishers