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Or think, again, of the Zeus of Dodona. The oracle of Dodona, with its dim grove of oaks, and sounding instruments of brass to husband the faintest whisper in the leaves, was but a great consecration of that sense of a mysterious will, of which people still feel, or seem to feel, the expression, in the motions of the wind, as it comes and goes, and which makes it, indeed, seem almost more than a mere symbol of the spirit within us. For Zeus was, indeed, the god of the winds also; Aeolus, their so-called god, being only his mortal minister, as having come, by long study of them, through signs in the fire and the like, to have a certain communicable skill regarding them, in relation to practical uses. Now, suppose a Greek sculptor to have proposed to himself to present to his worshippers the image of this Zeus of Dodona, who is in the trees and on the currents of the air. Then, if he had been a really imaginative sculptor, working as Pheidias worked, the very soul of those moving, sonorous creatures would have passed through his hand, into the eyes and hair of the image; as they can actually pass into the visible expression of those who have drunk deeply of them; as we may notice, sometimes, in our walks on mountain or shore.

Victory again–Nike–associated so often with Zeus–on the top of his staff, on the foot of his throne, on the palm of his extended hand– meant originally, mythologic science tells us, only the great victory of the sky, the triumph of morning over darkness. But that physical morning of her origin has its ministry to the later aesthetic sense also. For if Nike, when she appears in company with the mortal, and wholly fleshly hero, in whose chariot she stands to guide the horses, or whom she crowns with her garland of parsley or bay, or whose names she writes on a shield, is imaginatively conceived, it is because the old skyey influences are still not quite suppressed in her clear-set eyes, and the dew of the morning still clings to her wings and her floating hair.

The office of the imagination, then, in Greek sculpture, in its handling of divine persons, is thus to condense the impressions of natural things into human form; to retain that early mystical sense of water, or wind, or light, in the moulding of eye and brow; to arrest it, or rather, perhaps, to set it free, there, as human expression. The body of man, indeed, was for the Greeks, still the genuine work of Prometheus; its connexion with earth and air asserted in many a legend, not shaded down, as with us, through innumerable stages of descent, but direct and immediate; in precise contrast to our physical theory of our life, which never seems to fade, dream over it as we will, out of the light of common day. The oracles with their messages to human intelligence from birds and springs of water, or vapours of the earth, were a witness to that connexion. Their story went back, as they believed, with unbroken continuity, and in the very places where their later life was lived, to a past, stretching beyond, yet continuous with, actual memory, in which heaven and earth mingled; to those who were sons and daughters of stars, and streams, and dew; to an ancestry of grander men and women, actually clothed in, or incorporate with, the qualities and influences of those objects; and we can hardly over-estimate the influence on the Greek imagination of this mythical connexion with the natural world, at not so remote a date, and of the solemnising power exercised thereby over their thoughts. In this intensely poetical situation, the historical Greeks, the Athenians of the age of Pericles, found themselves; it was as if the actual roads on which men daily walk, went up and on, into a visible wonderland.