Cast out from Olympus and Asgard, they were thankful for
the hospitality of the chimney-corner, and kept soul and body together by
an illicit traffic between this world and the other. While Schiller was
lamenting the Gods of Greece, some of them were nearer neighbors to him
than he dreamed; and Heine had the wit to turn them to delightful
account, showing himself, perhaps, the wiser of the two in saving what he
could from the shipwreck of the past for present use on this prosaic Juan
Fernandez of a scientific age, instead of sitting down to bewail it. To
make the pagan divinities hateful, they were stigmatized as cacodaemons;
and as the human mind finds a pleasure in analogy and system, an infernal
hierarchy gradually shaped itself as the convenient antipodes and
counterpoise of the celestial one. Perhaps at the bottom of it all there
was a kind of unconscious manicheism, and Satan, as Prince of Darkness,
or of the Powers of the Air, became at last a sovereign, with his great
feudatories and countless vassals, capable of maintaining a not unequal
contest with the King of Heaven. He was supposed to have a certain power
of bestowing earthly prosperity, but he was really, after all, nothing
better than a James II. at St.
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