with the fragrance of flowers, and
eternally fanned by refreshing breezes. They were represented
merely as the select abode of a small number of living men, who
were either the mortal relatives or the special favorites of the
gods, and who were transported thither without tasting death,
there to pass an immortality which was described, with great
inconsistency, sometimes as purely happy, sometimes as joyless and
wearisome. To all except a few chosen ones this region was utterly
inaccessible. Homer says, "But for you, O Menelaus, it is not
decreed by the gods to die; but the immortals will send you to the
Elysian plain, because you are the son in law of Zeus."4 Had the
inheritance of this clime been proclaimed as the reward of heroic
merit, had it been really believed attainable by virtue, it would
have been held up as a prize to be striven for. The whole account,
as it was at first, bears the impress of imaginative fiction as
legibly upon its front as the story of the dragon watched garden
of Hesperus's daughters, whose trees bore golden apples, or the
story of the enchanted isle in the Arabian tales.

The early location of Elysium, and the conditions of admission to
it, were gradually changed; and at length it reappeared, in the
under world, as the abode of the just. On one side of the
primitive Hades Tartarus had now been drawn up to admit the
condemned into its penal tortures, and on the other side Elysium
was lowered down to reward the justified by receiving them into
its peaceful and perennial happiness; while, between the two,
Erebus

4 Odyssey, lib. iv. II. 555-570.

remained as an intermediate state of negation and gloom for
unsentenced shades. The highly colored descriptions of this
subterranean heaven, frequently found thenceforth, it is to be
supposed were rarely accepted as solid verities. They were
scarcely ever used, to our knowledge, as motives in life,
incitement in difficulties, consolation in sorrow. They were
mostly set forth in poems, works even professedly fictitious. They
were often denied and ridiculed in speeches and writings received
with public applause. Still, they unquestionably exerted some
influence on the common modes of thought and feeling, had a
shadowy seat in the popular imagination and heart, helped men to
conceive of a blessed life hereafter and to long for it, and took
away something of the artificial horror with which, under the
power of rooted superstition, their departing