be not clothed in the
classic robes of the senate-chamber or the flowing garments of the
professor, he wears at least the fawn's dappled hide, and in his hand

'His thyrsus holds--an ivy-crowned spear.'

Does not the gentle Euripides show us the god, 'his horned head with
dragon wreath entwined?' And those two sacred horns point back to the
dread mysteries of the Ogdoad sublime,

'The great Cabiri of earth's dawning prime.'

They trace with lines that never swerve from truth the history of the
primeval world, the early days of Noah and his ark. They recall to us
the old story of life and suffering, of deluge and salvation; on their
crescent points hangs the eternal principle of the efficacy of
sacrifice. They float with the moon-ark of Astarte Mylitta on
hyacinthine seas of night-clouds, and their high import, dimmed and lost
in the great stream of Time, rises again in the ages, uncrowned with the
early luxuriance of symbol and mystery. The mystic horns appear over the
brow of the queenly Sappho of Grillparzer, upon whose hair

'Rested the diadem, _like the pale moon_
Upon the brow of night, a silver crest;'

and the white-robed Madonna, with child-like face upraised, and deep,
tender eyes uplifted, yet rests her slender, sandaled foot upon the
horned moon, floating below her in misty clouds.

A hiatus for which we crave indulgence; a dream, and yet not all a
dream, for each of these old types encloses a living truth, and unfolds
into a history, tangled, perhaps, and imperfect, but suggestive and
reliable, of races and religions that had else passed away into
oblivion. And the earnest student of the present, or the historian of
the past, can never disregard these dim old treasures, but must draw
from them a fresher faith in his own humanity and in the eternal laws of
God, that are unchangeable as he is immortal.

The art of history advances with the art of poetry; both, and indeed all
literature, correspond aesthetically with the manners, customs,
theology, and politics of the nation of their birth. The severe
grandeur of Thucydides, the invariable sweetness of Xenophon, and the
cheerful elegance of Herodotus, recall, with their just conceptions of
harmony, their noble and sustained flow of thought, and their freedom
from the adventitious ornaments of an exaggerated rhetoric or a
sentimental morality, the golden age of Greece. We seem to stand within
the Parthenon, to gaze upon the Venus of Cnidus, to