212 THE OLIVE LEAF. CHAP. 



their future state. The immortality they conceived 

 was as lifeless and joyless as the juiceless leaves and 

 flowers of this representative plant, which, though they 

 preserved their form and colour after having been 

 plucked for an indefinite period, had none of the 

 bloom and freshness of life about them. Their hell 

 had indeed a singularly distinct and vivid realization 

 in their minds ; there are no pictures of the fate of 

 the wicked more dreadful even in the Inferno of Dante 

 than those which their poets present before us in Ixion 

 and his wheel, Tantalus and his draught of water, 

 Sisyphus and his stone, Prometheus and his vulture, 

 and the Danaids and their leaky buckets. Their only 

 distinct idea of a future world was confined to the 

 incidents of punishment. All distinctness, on the other 

 hand, disappears as we enter the melancholy meadows 

 of asphodel which constituted their shadowy image 

 of Elysium. Their amaranthine bowers were dry and 

 ghostly, having the semblance of life, but none of its 

 play and blessedness. The world of the immortals 

 was a world of shadows inhabited by shades, wherein 

 there was nothing but the exuvice of life the phan- 

 toms of former existence. Ossian never imagined more 

 misty outlines, or peopled his heath of Lodi with 

 forms more pale and unsubstantial. There the ex- 

 periment of the alchemist was performed on a great 

 scale. Out of the ashes of the flower that had been 

 consumed arose a delicate apparition of stalk and 

 leaf and blossom the phantom plant faithful to its 

 former image as the lovely transcript of scenery in 



