ng.

The Greeks must be conceived of as a nation of poets; hence all their
mythology was poetry. Poetry was their life and joy, written or unwritten,
sung or spoken. They were poets in the deeper sense of the word; not by
writing verses, but by looking at all nature and all life from its poetic
side. Their exquisite mythology arose out of these spontaneous instincts.
The tendency of the Greek mind was to vitalize and harmonize nature.[228]

All the phenomena of nature, all the powers of the human soul, and all the
events of life, became a marvellous tissue of divine story. They walked
the earth, surrounded and overshadowed by heavenly attendants and
supernatural powers. But a striking peculiarity of this immense
spiritualism was that it was almost without superstition. Their gods were
not their terror, but their delight. Even the great gods of Olympus were
around them as invisible companions. Fate itself, the dark Moira, supreme
power, mistress of gods and men, was met manfully and not timorously. So
strong was the human element, the sense of personal dignity and freedom,
that the Greek lived in the midst of a supernatural world on equal terms.

No doubt the elements of mythology are in all nations the same, consisting
of the facts of nature and the facts of life. The heavens and the earth,
day and night, the sun and moon, storms, fire, ocean, and rivers, love and
beauty, life and progress, war, wisdom, doom, and chance,--these, among
all nations, supply the material for myths. But while, with some races,
these powers remain solemn abstractions, above and behind nature, among
the Greeks they descended into nature and turned to poetry, illuminating
all of life.

Let us imagine a Greek, possessed by the spirit of his nation and
acquainted with its legendary history, visiting the holy places of that
ideal land. On the northern boundary he sees the towering summit of
Olympus, on whose solemn heights reside the twelve great gods of his
country. When the dark clouds roll along its defiles, and the lightning
flashes from their black depths, it is Zeus, striking with his thunderbolt
some impious offender. There was held the great council of the Immortals.
When the ocean was quiet, Poseidon had left it to visit Olympus. There
came Hephaestos, quitting his subterranean fires and gloomy laborers, to
jest and be jested with, sitting by his beautiful queen. There, while the
sun hung motionless in mid-heaven, Apollo descended from