They were indeed the dead: the dead who—dying earliest, whilst yet the earth was young enough to sorrow for its heroic lives to embalm them, to remember them, and to count them worthy of lament—perished in their bodies, but lived forever immortal in the traditions of the world.

From every space of the somber chamber some one of these gazed on her through the mist.

Here the silver dove of Argos winged her way through the iron-jaws of the dark sea-gates.

Here the white Io wandered in exile and unresting, forever scourged on by the sting in her flesh, as a man by the genius in him.

Here the glad god whom all the woodlands love played in the moonlight, on his reeds, to the young stags that couched at his feet in golden beds of daffodils and asphodel.

Here in a darkened land the great Demeter moved, bereaved and childless, bidding the vine be barren, and the fig-trees fruitless, and the seed of the sown furrows strengthless to multiply and fill the sickles with ripe increase.

Here the women of Thebes danced upon Cithæron in the mad moonless nights, under the cedars, with loose hair on the wind, and bosoms that heaved and brake through their girdles of fawnskin.

Here at his labor, in Pheræ, the sun-god toiled as a slave; the highest wrought as the lowest; while wise Hermes stood by and made mirth of the kingship that had bartered the rod of dominion for the mere music which empty air could make in a hollow reed.

Here, too, the brother gods stood, Hypnos, and Oneiros, and Thanatos; their bowed heads crowned with the poppy and moonwort, the flowering fern, and the amaranth, and, pressed to their lips, a white rose, in the old sweet symbol of silence; fashioned in the same likeness, with the same winged feet, which yet fall so softly that no human ears hear their coming; the gods that most of all have pity on men,—the gods of the Night and of the Grave.

These she saw, not plainly, but through the wavering shadows and the halo of the vapors which floated, dense and silvery as smoke, in from the misty river. Their lips were dumb, and for her they had no name nor story, and yet they spoke to her with familiar voices. She knew them; she knew that they were gods, and yet to the world were dead; and in the eyes of the forest-god, who piped upon his reeds, she saw the eyes of Phratos look on her with their tender laughter and their unforgotten love.