II.
In spite of myself I have been dreaming here of the antique gods, sons of Greece, and made in the likeness of their country. They were born in a similar country, and they spring to life again here in ourselves, with the sentiments which gave birth to them.
I imagine idle and curious herdsmen, of fresh and infantile souls, not yet possessed by the authority of a neighboring civilization and an established dogma, but active, hardy, and poets by nature. They dream—and of what, if not of the huge beings that all day long besiege their eyes? How fantastical are those jagged heads, those bruised and heaped-up bodies, those twisted shoulders! What unknown monsters, what melancholy, misshapen race, alien to humanity! By what-dread travail has the earth brought them forth from her womb, and what contests have their blasted heads sustained amidst clouds and thunderbolts! They still threaten to-day; the eagles and the vultures are alone welcome to sound their depths. They love not man; their bowlders lie in wait to roll upon him, so soon as he shall violate their solitudes. With a shiver they hurl upon his harvests a tide of rocks; they have but to gather up a storm in order to drown him like an ant.
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How changeable is their face, but always to be dreaded! What lightnings their summits hurl among the creeping fogs! That flash causes fear like the eye of some tyrant god, seen for a moment, then hid again. There are mountains that weep, amidst their gloomy bogs, and their tears trickle down their aged cheeks with a hollow sob, betwixt pines that rustle and whisper sorrowfully, as if pitying that eternal mourning. Others, seated in a ring, bathe their feet in lakes the color of steel, and which no wind ever ruffles; they are happy in such calm, and gaze into the virgin wave at their silver helmet. How mysterious are they at night, and what evil thoughts do they turn over in winter, when wrapped in their shroud of snow! But in the broad day and in summer, with what buoyancy and how glorified rises their forehead to the sublimest heights of air, into pure and radiant realms, into light, to their own native country. All scarred and monstrous though they be, they are still the gods of the earth, and they have aspired to be gods of heaven.