l in their mountain-propped halls on the far
summits of many-peaked Olympus, or lean voluptuously from their
celestial balconies and belvederes, soothed by the Apollonian lyre, the
Heban nectar, and the fragrant incense, which reeks up in purple clouds
from the shrines of windy Ilion, hollow Lacedaemon, Argos, Mycenae,
Athens, and the cities of the old Greek isles, with their shrine-capped
headlands. The outlooks and watch-towers of the chief deities were all
visible from the far streets and dwellings of their earthly
worshippers, in that clear, shining, Grecian atmosphere. Uranography
was then far better understood than geography, and the personages
composing the heavenly synod were almost as definitely known to the
Homeric men as their mortal acquaintances. The architect of the
Olympian palaces was surnamed Amphigueeis, or the Halt. The Homeric
gods were men divinized with imperishable frames, glorious and immortal
sensualists, never visited by qualms of conscience, by headache, or
remorse, or debility, or wrinkles, or dyspepsia, however deep their
potations, however fiercely they indulged their appetites. Zeus, the
Grand Seignior or Sultan of Olympus and father of gods and men,
surpassed Turk and Mormon Elder in his uxoriousness and indiscriminate
concubinage. With Olympian goddess and lone terrestrial nymph and
deep-bosomed mortal lass of Hellas, the land of lovely women, as Homer
calls it, did he pursue his countless intrigues, which he sometimes had
the unblushing coolness and impudence to rehearse to his wedded wife,
Here. His _list_ would have thrown Don Giovanni's entirely into the
shade. Here, the queen of Olympus, called the Golden-Throned, the
Venerable, the Ox-Eyed, was a sort of celestial Queen Bess, the
undaunted she-Tudor, whose father, bluff Harry, was not a bad human
copy of Zeus himself, the Rejoicer in Thunder.

In that old Homeric heaven,--in those quiet seats of the gods of the
heroic world, which were never shaken by storm-wind, nor lashed by the
tempest that raved far below round the dwellings of wretched
mortals,--in those quiet abodes above the thunder, there was for the
most part nought but festal joy, music, choral dances, and emptying of
nectar-cups, interrupted now and then by descents into the low-lying
region of human life in quest of adventure, or on errands of divine
intervention in the affairs of men, for whom, on the whole, Zeus and
his court entertained sentiments of profound contemp