as the reward of his
resolute labor.

92. "[Greek: Haphaiston technaisi]." Note that word of Pindar in the
Seventh Olympic. This ax-blow of Vulcan's was to the Greek mind truly
what Clytemnestra falsely asserts hers to have been, "[Greek: tes de
dexias cheros, ergon, dikaias tektonos]"; physically, it meant the
opening of the blue through the rent clouds of heaven, by the action of
local terrestrial heat (of Hephaestus as opposed to Apollo, who shines on
the surface of the upper clouds, but cannot pierce them); and,
spiritually, it meant the first birth of prudent thought out of rude
labor, the clearing-ax in the hand of the woodman being the practical
elementary sign of his difference from the wild animals of the wood.
Then he goes on, "From the high head of her Father, Athenaia rushing
forth, cried with her great and exceeding cry; and the Heaven trembled
at her, and the Earth Mother." The cry of Athena, I have before pointed
out, physically distinguishes her, as the spirit of the air, from silent
elemental powers; but in this grand passage of Pindar it is again the
mythic cry of which he thinks; that is to say, the giving articulate
words, by intelligence, to the silence of Fate. "Wisdom crieth aloud,
she uttereth her voice in the streets," and Heaven and Earth tremble at
her reproof.

93. Uttereth her voice in the "streets." For all men, that is to say;
but to what work did the Greeks think that her voice was to call them?
What was to be the impulse communicated by her prevailing presence; what
the sign of the people's obedience to her?

This was to be the sign--"But she, the goddess herself, gave to them to
prevail over the dwellers upon earth, _with best-laboring hands in every
art. And by their paths there were the likenesses of living and of
creeping things_; and the glory was deep. For to the cunning workman,
greater knowledge comes, undeceitful."

94. An infinitely pregnant passage, this, of which to-day you are to
note mainly these three things: First, that Athena is the goddess of
Doing, not at all of sentimental inaction. She is begotten, as it were,
of the woodman's ax; her purpose is never in a word only, but in a word
and a blow. She guides the hands that labor best, in every art.

95. Secondly. The victory given by Wisdom, the worker, to the hands that
labor best, is that the streets and ways, [Greek: keleuthoi], shall be
filled by likenesses of living and creeping things.

Things living, and cre