The oracles with
their messages to human intelligence from birds and springs of water,
or vapours of the earth, were a witness to that connexion. Their
story went back, as they believed, with unbroken continuity, and in
the very places where their later life was lived, to a past,
stretching beyond, yet continuous with, actual memory, in which
heaven and earth mingled; to those who were sons and daughters of
stars, and streams, and dew; to an ancestry of grander men and women,
actually clothed in, or incorporate with, the qualities and
influences of those objects; and we can hardly over-estimate the
influence on the Greek imagination of this mythical connexion with
the natural world, at not so remote a date, and of the solemnising
power exercised thereby over their thoughts. In this intensely
poetical situation, the historical Greeks, the Athenians of the age
of Pericles, found themselves; it was as if the actual roads on which
men daily walk, went up and on, into a visible wonderland.
[34] With such habitual impressions concerning the body, the physical
nature of man, the Greek sculptor, in his later day, still free in
imagination, through the lingering influence of those early dreams,
may have more easily infused into human form the sense of sun, or
lightning, or cloud, to which it was so closely akin, the spiritual
flesh allying itself happily to mystical meanings, and readily
expressing seemingly unspeakable qualities.
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