Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/41

 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF GREEK. 1 9 A mother whose son has been killed expresses her grief: "The harts and the deers run on the mountains, only one sad roe does not follow them ; she seeks the shade and rests on her left side ; when she finds clear water she disturbs it before drinking. The sun meets her, rests on her way and asks: What aileth thee, my poor roe? Why dost thou seek the shade and rest on thy left side? Sun, thou askest me, and I will answer thee. For twelve years I was childless; finally I had one child. I nour- ished and I raised it. When it was exactly two years old a hunter killed it. Maledic- tion upon thee, hunter, thou hast killed my husband and thou hast robbed me of my child." In many of these songs we observe all the vivacity of the inexhaustible imagination of the ancients, and we are carried away into the re- mote times when poetical creations peopled the Olympus and when the poets made them enter into human dramas. It was in Athens last summer; the moon shone, the stars were more brilliant than we see them in our climate, all surroundings were as beautiful as we can find them only in the most favored spots of our planet, when I heard for the