GREEK MYTHS 33 



them, calling forth visions of grace and beauty, and 

 at the same time imparting to these visions a variety 

 and vigour which would hardly have been developed 

 among the dwellers on monotonous plains. The 

 natural influence of scenery and climate like those 

 of Greece upon the imagination of a race endowed 

 with a large share of the poetic faculty has never 

 been more forcibly or gracefully expressed than by 

 our own Wordsworth, in a well-known passage in 

 the fourth book of his Excursion. 



With the source of the early Hellenic myths we 

 are not so much concerned in the present inquiry as 

 with the form in which they have reached us. Whether 

 they arose in Greece, or, having been brought from 

 some other home, received their final shape there, is 

 of less moment than the "actual guise in which we 

 find them in the earliest Greek literature. There 

 cannot, I think, be any doubt that to the striking 

 topography of Thessaly they are largely indebted for 

 the dress in which they appear in the poems of 

 Homer and Hesiod. We may recognise among them 

 some of the earliest recorded efforts of the human 

 imagination to interpret the aspects of nature, and 

 these aspects were unmistakably such as presented 

 themselves in that particular portion of the ancient 

 world. 



The wide Thessalian plain, the largest area of low- 

 land in Greece, lies upon Cretaceous and Tertiary 

 rocks, which, in the lower parts of the region, are 

 overlain with a level tract of alluvial soil. Round 

 this plain stretches a girdle of lofty and imposing 

 mountains, composed chiefly of hard crystalline schists 



