The Project Gutenberg eBook, Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859, by Various

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Title: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859

Author: Various

Release Date: January 12, 2004 [eBook #10695] [Date last updated: July 17, 2005]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 15, JANUARY, 1859***

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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

CONTENTS

Agrarianism

Bulls and Bears
Bundle of Old Letters, A

Calculus, The Differential and Integral
Charge with Prince Rupert
Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith
Coffee and Tea

Did I?

El Llanero

Gymnasium, The

Holbein and the Dance of Death

Illustrious Obscure, The
In a Cellar
In the Pines

Juanita

Letter to a Dyspeptic, A
Lizzy Griswold's Thanksgiving

Men of the Sea
Mien-yaun
Minister's Wooing, The

New Life of Dante, The

Odds and Ends from the Old World
Olympus and Asgard
Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?

Palfrey's and Arnold's Histories
Plea for the Fijians, A
Professor at the Breakfast-Table, The

Roba di Roma

Shakespeare's Art
Smollett, Some Unedited Memorials of
Stereoscope and Stereograph, The

Trip to Cuba, A
Two Sniffs

Utah Expedition, The

White's Shakspeare
Why did the Governess Faint?
Winter Birds, The

POETRY.

Achmed and his Mare
At Sea

Bloodroot

Chicadee

Double-Headed Snake of Newbury, The
Drifting

Hamlet at the Boston

Inscription for an Alms-Chest

Joy-Month

Last Bird, The
Left Behind

Morning Street, The

Our Skater Belle

Palm and the Pine, The
Philter, The
Prayer for Life

Sphinx, The
Spring

Two Years After

Walker of the Snow, The
Waterfall, The

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Allibone's Dictionary of Authors
Arabian Days' Entertainments
Avenger, The

Bacon, The Works of
Bitter-Sweet
Bryant, Durand's Portrait of
Bunsen's Gott in der Geschichte

Cotton's Illustrated Cabinet Atlas
Courtship of Miles Standish

Dexter's Street Thoughts
Duyckinck's Life of George Herbert

Emerson, Rowse's Portrait of
Ernest Carroll

Furness's Thoughts on the Life and Character of Jesus

Hamilton's Lecture on Metaphysics
Hymns of the Ages

Index to Catalogue of Boston City Library

Lytton, R.B., (Owen Meredith,) Poems by

Mathematical Monthly, The
Morgan's, Lady, Autobiography
Mothers and Infants, Nurses and Nursing
Mustee, The

Prescott's Philip II

Sawyer's New Testament
Seddon, Thomas, Memoir and Letters of
Sixty Years' Gleanings from Life's Harvest
Stratford Gallery, The
Symbols of the Capital

Trübner's Bibliographical Guide to American Literature

Vernon Grove

Whittier, Barry's Portrait of
Wilson's Conquest of Mexico

LIST OF BOOKS

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. III.—JANUARY, 1859.—NO. XV.

OLYMPUS AND ASGARD.

How remote from the nineteenth century of the Christian era lies the old Homeric world! By the magic of the Ionian minstrel's verse that world is still visible to the inner eye. Through the clouds and murk of twenty centuries and more, it is still possible to catch clear glimpses of it, as it lies there in the golden sunshine of the ancient days. A thousand objects nearer in the waste of past time are far more muffled, opaque, and impervious to vision. As you enter it through the gates of the "Ilias" and "Odusseia," you bid a glad adieu to the progress of the age, to railroads and telegraph-wires, to cotton-spinning, (there might have been some of that done, however, in some Nilotic Manchester or Lowell,) to the diffusion of knowledge and the rights of man and societies for the improvement of our race, to humanitarianism and philanthropy, to science and mechanics, to the printing-press and gunpowder, to industrialism, clipper-ships, power-looms, metaphysics, geology, observatories, light-houses, and a myriad other things too numerous for specification,—and you pass into a sunny region of glorious sensualism, where there are no obstinate questionings of outward things, where there are no blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realized, no morbid self-accusings of a morbid methodistic conscience. All there in that old world, lit "by the strong vertical light" of Homer's genius, is healthful, sharply-defined, tangible, definite, and sensualistic. Even the divine powers, the gods themselves, are almost visible to the eyes of their worshippers, as they revel 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 Amphiguëeis, 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