fellows nearer to the source of all Deity, as Socrates and Plato had raised
men? Who could portray himself as Phidias had portrayed Athene? Could the
Muses speak with their own voices as they had spoken by Sappho's? He was
especially pleased to see his own moral superiority to Zeus so eloquently
enforced by Æschylus, and delighted in criticising the sentiments which
the other poets had put into the mouths of the gods. Homer, he thought,
must have been in Olympus often, and Aristophanes not seldom. When he read
in the Cyclops of Euripides, "Stranger, I laugh to scorn Zeus's
thunderbolts," he grew for a moment thoughtful. "Am I," he questioned,
"ending where Polyphemus began?" But when he read a little further on:

The wise man's only Jupiter is this,
To eat and drink during his little day,
And give himself no care--

"No," he said, "the Zeus that nailed me to the rock is better than this
Zeus. But well for man to be rid of both, if he does not put another in
their place; or, in dropping his idolatry, has not flung away his religion.
Heaven has not departed with Zeus." And, taking his lyre, he sang:

What floods of lavish splendour
The lofty sun doth pour!
What else can Heaven render?
What room hath she for more?

Yet shall his course be shortly done,
And after his declining
The skies that held a single Sun
With thousands shall be shining.