papacy we prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst
now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?"

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has
in literature,--in all fable as well as in all history.
He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who described
strange and impossible situations, but that universal
man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true
for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines
wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he
was born. One after another he comes up in his private
adventures with every fable of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz,
of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with
his own head and hands.

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper
creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, are
universal verities. What a range of meanings and what
perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus!
Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the
history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling
authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts
and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history
of religion, with some closeness to the faith of later
ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He
is the friend of man; stands between the unjust "justice"
of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and readily
suffers all things on their account. But where it departs
from the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as the
defier of Jove, it represents a state of mind which readily