him Aphrodite is made to fall in love. She presents herself to him in a human disguise, and meets his advances with a long account of her birth and parentage, and begs him to take her back to her parents, and having asked for her hand and fulfilled all customary formalities, to lead her away as his lawful wife. The passion which at the same time, however, she is careful to breathe into him cannot brook so long a delay: and she yields to his impatience. When about to leave him she awakes him from his sleep, turns upon him the full glance of her divinity, and reveals her name and his destiny. She will bear him a son, Æneas, who will be one of the greatest princes and heroes of Troy; but he himself will be stricken with feebleness and a premature old age, in punishment for the involuntary sacrilege which he has committed.

The description of the disguised goddess, with its Homeric pomp and elaborate propriety, is a noble and masterly one, underlined, as it were, with a certain satirical or dramatic intention; we have the directness of a Nausicaa, with a more luxurious and passionate beauty. The revelation of the goddess is wonderfully made, with that parallel movement of natural causes and divine workings which is so often to be admired in Homer. The divinity of the visitant appears only at the moment of her flight, when she becomes a consecration and an unattainable memory. The sight of deity leaves the eyes dull, like those of the Platonic prisoners returning from the sunlight of truth into the den of appearance. Nay more, a communion with the divinity, closer than is consonant with human frailty, leaves the seer impotent and a burden upon the world; but this personal tragedy is not without its noble fruits to posterity. Anchises suffers, but his son Æneas, the issue of that divine though punishable union, lives to bear, not only the aged Anchises himself, but the gods of Ilium, out of the ruins of Troy.

Such analogies carry us, no doubt, far beyond the intention of the hymn or of the exoteric religion to which it ministers. The story-teller's delight in his story is the obvious motive of such compositions, even when they reflect indirectly the awe in which the divine impersonations of natural forces were held by the popular religion. All that we may fairly imagine to have been in the mind of the pious singer is the sense that something divine comes down among us in the crises of our existence, and that this visitation is fraught with immense although vague possibilities of both good and evil. The gods sometimes appear, and when they do they bring us a foretaste of that sublime victory of mind over matter which we may never gain in experience but which may constantly be gained in thought. When natural phenomena are conceived as the manifestation of divine life, human life itself, by sympathy with that ideal projection of itself, enlarges its customary bounds, until it seems capable of becoming the life of the universe. A god is a conceived victory of mind over Nature. A visible god is the consciousness of such a victory momentarily attained. The vision soon vanishes, the sense of omnipotence is soon dispelled by recurring conflicts with hostile forces; but the momentary illusion of that realized good has left us with the perennial knowledge of good as an ideal. Therein lies the essence and the function of religion.