Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida'.djvu/283

Rh that had dared to dethrone Rome! The hordes of the Forest and the Desert avenged the wrongs of the Scipii and the Julii. It was but just?" As the soldiers of Islam avenged the gods of Greece. Aphrodite perished that Arians might rage« and the beautiful mythus was swept away, that hell and the devil might be believed in instead! When the Crescent glittered there, it half redressed the wrongs of your Olympus."

"And we reign still!" She turned, as she spoke, towards the western waters, where the sea-line of the Ægean lay, while in her eyes came the look of a royal pride and of a deathless love.

"Greece cannot die! No matter what the land be now, Greece—our Greece—must live for ever. Her language lives; the children of Europe learn it, even if they halt it in imperfect numbers. The greater the scholar the humbler he still bends to learn the words of wisdom from her schools. The poet comes to her for all his fairest myths, his noblest mysteries, his greatest masters. The sculptor looks at the broken fragments of her statues, and throws aside his Calliope in despair before those matchless wrecks. From her, soldiers learn how to die, and nations how to conquer and to