ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἀφ’ ὑψηλῆς κορυφῆς ὄρεος μεγάλοιο
κινήσῃ πυκινὴν νεφέλην στεροπηγερέτα Ζεύς,
ἔκ τ’ ἔφανεν πᾶσαι σκοπιαὶ καὶ πρώονες ἄκροι
καὶ νάπαι, οὐρανόθεν δ’ ἄρ’ ὑπερράγη ἄσπετος αἰθήρ.[48]
Il. xvi. 297.
But here the unmoved rock is merely a background of darkness, in contrast to the light of the clouds, as in the Prometheus it is a background of stillness to the motion of the drama.
We have also, in the theory that motion was essentially connected with the ancient ideal of beauty, some explanation of the fact that rounded heights, clothed with leafy woods where the wind could
‘fling
Their placid green to silver of delight.’
seemed more beautiful to the Greeks than scarps of naked rock; and it is natural that the poets of such an ideal, superficial though it may seem to us, should pass by the silent majesty of Ætna with careless customary epithets until the fires within burst their bounds and poured ostentatiously to the sea in ‘eddies of blood-red flame.’
It would seem that the Greeks felt fear and awe alone of the great mountains, as was natural; for they had no intimate knowledge of them, nor ever sought in the mountains the emotions reserved for those who match their strength against the great forces of nature. These sensations, in the Greek, were inspired by the sea. But for us the spell of the mountains has grown stronger than that of the waves, for the days are gone in which the sea alone was the home of peril and mystery. We follow the spirit of the Greeks, not the letter of their song; for though they sang of the sea, it was of her freedom and strength, of her secrets and dangers, and of these much has passed from her. Though we may still cross the seas on which the Argo sailed, the greater part of their romance is dead, and the Admiralty charts are its epitaph. Scylla and Charybdis are mapped; there is, for the vandal to read, a latitude and a longitude of Tyre.
We have still with us the seas of romance, of the Sagas, of the Odyssey, of the Ancient Mariner; we may still look from
‘Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faëry lands forlorn.’
But these are armchair adventures, fireside voyages: these we must share with the cripple and the old. We who are young may find in the mountains new worlds of adventure and romance of which the Greeks knew nothing; but though the beauties, the perils, the rewards are changed, the spirit is the same. No sea hero of the Greeks would be long a stranger among mountaineers: where now but in the mountains should Odysseus wander, πολύτλας, πολύμητις, first in every quest of perilous glory, crowning the hopes of long years of wanderers?
Our mountain-worship is then no new creed, nor artificial dogma, but a new epiphany of the spirit of Hellas; and the spirit will be the same, even though the men of later ages find their romance beneath the seas whereon the Greeks sought it, or above the mountains in which our quest is set.