Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 15, January, 1859

Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 15,
January, 1859

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January, 1859, by Various
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Title: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859
Author: Various
Release Date: January 12, 2004 [eBook #10695]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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MONTHLY, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 15, JANUARY, 1859***
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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

CONTENTS
Agrarianism
Bulls and Bears Bundle of Old Letters, A
Calculus, The Differential and Integral Charge with Prince Rupert
Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith Coffee and Tea
Did I?
El Llanero

Gymnasium, The
Holbein and the Dance of Death
Illustrious Obscure, The In a Cellar In the Pines
Juanita
Letter to a Dyspeptic, A Lizzy Griswold's Thanksgiving
Men of the Sea Mien-yaun Minister's Wooing, The
New Life of Dante, The
Odds and Ends from the Old World Olympus and Asgard Ought
Women to Learn the Alphabet?
Palfrey's and Arnold's Histories Plea for the Fijians, A Professor at the
Breakfast-Table, The
Roba di Roma
Shakespeare's Art Smollett, Some Unedited Memorials of Stereoscope
and Stereograph, The
Trip to Cuba, A Two Sniffs
Utah Expedition, The
White's Shakspeare Why did the Governess Faint? Winter Birds, The
POETRY.
Achmed and his Mare At Sea
Bloodroot
Chicadee
Double-Headed Snake of Newbury, The Drifting
Hamlet at the Boston
Inscription for an Alms-Chest
Joy-Month
Last Bird, The Left Behind
Morning Street, The
Our Skater Belle
Palm and the Pine, The Philter, The Prayer for Life
Sphinx, The Spring
Two Years After
Walker of the Snow, The Waterfall, The
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Allibone's Dictionary of Authors Arabian Days' Entertainments
Avenger, The
Bacon, The Works of Bitter-Sweet Bryant. Durand's Portrait, of
Bunsen's Gott in der Geschichte

Cotton's Illustrated Cabinet Atlas Courtship of Miles Standish
Dexter's Street Thoughts Duyckinck's Life of George Herbert
Emerson, Rowse's Portrait of Ernest Carroll
Furness's Thoughts on the Life and Character of Jesus
Hamilton's Lecture on Metaphysics Hymns of the Ages
Index to Catalogue of Boston City Library
Lytton, R.B., (Owen Meredith,) Poems by
Mathematical Monthly, The Morgan's, Lady, Autobiography Mothers
and Infants, Nurses and Nursing Mustee, The
Prescott's Philip II
Sawyer's New Testament Seddon, Thomas. Memoir and Letters of
Sixty Years' Gleanings from Life's Harvest Stratford Gallery, The
Symbols of the Capital
Trübner's Bibliographical Guide to American Literature
Vernon Grove
Whittier, Barry's Portrait of Wilson's Conquest of Mexico
LIST OF BOOKS

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. III.--JANUARY, 1859.--NO. XV.

OLYMPUS AND ASGARD.
How remote from the nineteenth century of the Christian era lies the
old Homeric world! By the magic of the Ionian minstrel's verse that
world is still visible to the inner eye. Through the clouds and murk of
twenty centuries and more, it is still possible to catch clear glimpses of
it, as it lies there in the golden sunshine of the ancient days. A thousand
objects nearer in the waste of past time are far more muffled, opaque,
and impervious to vision. As you enter it through the gates of the
"Ilias" and "Odusseia," you bid a glad adieu to the progress of the age,
to railroads and telegraph-wires, to cotton-spinning, (there might have
been some of that done, however, in some Nilotic Manchester or
Lowell,) to the diffusion of knowledge and the rights of man and
societies for the improvement of our race, to humanitarianism and
philanthropy, to science and mechanics, to the printing-press and

gunpowder, to industrialism, clipper-ships, power-looms, metaphysics,
geology, observatories, light-houses, and a myriad other things too
numerous for specification,--and you pass into a sunny region of
glorious sensualism, where there are no obstinate questionings of
outward things, where there are no blank misgivings of a creature
moving about in worlds not realized, no morbid self-accusings of a
morbid methodistic conscience. All there in that old world, lit "by the
strong vertical light" of Homer's genius, is healthful, sharply-defined,
tangible, definite, and sensualistic. Even the divine powers, the gods
themselves, are almost visible to the eyes of their worshippers, as they
revel in their mountain-propped halls on the far summits of
many-peaked Olympus, or lean voluptuously from their celestial
balconies and belvederes, soothed by the Apollonian lyre, the Heban
nectar, and the fragrant incense, which reeks up in purple clouds from
the shrines of windy Ilion, hollow Lacedaemon, Argos, Mycenae,
Athens, and the cities of the old Greek isles, with their shrine-capped
headlands. The outlooks and watch-towers of the chief