f sweet Fable trace!
The meadows mourn for the old hallowing life;
Vainly we search the earth of gods bereft;
Where once the warm and living shapes were rife,
Shadows alone are left!
Cold, from the North, has gone
Over the flowers the blast that chilled their May;
And, to enrich the worship of the One,
A universe of gods must pass away!
Mourning, I search on yonder starry steeps,
But thee, no more, Selene, there I see!
And through the woods I call, and o'er the deeps,
And--Echo answers me." [Bulwer's Translation.]

The Elysian beauty and melancholy grace which Wordsworth throws over
the shade of Alcestis were gleams borrowed from a better world than the
mythic Elysium. Neither Olympus nor Erebus disdained the pleasures of
sense.

Shakspeare, in his "Midsummer-Night's Dream," has mingled the
mythologies of Hellas and Scandinavia, of the North and the South,
making of them a sort of mythic _olla podrida_. He represents the tiny
elves and fays of the Gothic fairyland, span-long creatures of dew and
moonshine, the lieges of King Oberon, and of Titania, his queen, as
making an irruption from their haunted hillocks, woods, meres, meadows,
and fountains, in the North, into the olive-groves of Ilissus, and
dancing their ringlets in the ray of the Grecian Selene, the chaste,
cold huntress, and running by the triple Hecate's team, following the
shadow of Night round the earth. Strangely must have sounded the horns
of the Northern Elfland, "faintly blowing" in the woods of Hellas, as
Oberon and his grotesque court glanced along, "with bit and bridle
ringing," to bless the nuptials of Theseus with the bouncing Amazon.
Strangely must have looked the elfin footprints in the Attic green.
Across this Shakspearean plank, laid between Olympus and Asgard, or
more strictly Alfheim, we gladly pass from the sunny realm of Zeus into
that of his Northern counterpart, Odin, who ought to be dearer and more
familiar to his descendants than the Grecian Jove, though he is not.
The forms which throng Asgard may not be so sculpturesquely beautiful,
so definite, and fit to be copied in marble and bronze as those of
Olympus. There may be more vagueness of outline in the Scandinavian
abode of the gods, as of far-off blue skyey shapes, but it is more
cheerful and homelike. Pleasantly wave the evergreen boughs of the
Life-Tree, Yggdrasil, the mythic ash-tree of the old North, whose
leaves are green with an unwithering bloom t