HERO HUNTERS. 
13 
earth in magnificent Pantheons, it consecrated to them a salaried 
worship, and erected altars to those who had ransomed man from 
his misery and his ignorance. If it fell to the Greek people to eter- 
nize, by admirable monuments, the remembrance of benefits and its 
own gratitude, it is because the Greek people is the only one that has 
understood the sanctity of passion, the work of God, and that has 
dared to deify Love, the source of all poetry, of all justice, and all 
religion. 
A proof that the gratitude of the people has through all times 
attached to the name of the hunter, is that the hunter was in all 
times also the hero of popular legends on the banks of the Eurotas 
and Cephisus, as on those of Lake Ontario. The literature of North 
America, a country born but yesterday, has yet scarcely produced 
more than one masterpiece and one type. This masterpiece is a 
history of the hunt, this type is ‘‘ Leatherstocking, the primitive 
hunter, chaste and religious. 
The most adorable weaknesses of the goddesses of Olympus 
have also been due to some hunter. There are no two interests 
more strictly connected in history than those of the hunter and 
lovely woman, except those of the chase and of liberty. The god- 
dess of Paphos, of Cythera, and Gnidus ; Yenus, who was so much 
scandalized for her light conduct, never had a lover so much to 
her heart as the hunter Adonis, whom a formidable wild boar's tusk 
tore from her tenderness, and over whose wounds she shed so many 
tears that a flower sprang up thence. The rosy fingered Aurora ; 
Aurora, so refractory to the fires of old Titan, her legitimate hus- 
band, compromised herself scandalously for the hunter Cephalus. 
The chaste Diana herself could not resist too well the charms of 
Endymion, and more than once needed the pretext of an eclipse to 
explain the irregularities in her service of nocturnal illumination. 
Poetry attests that it is to the justness of his eye and to his reputa- 
tion as a skillful marksman, that the shepherd Paris, son of Priam, 
owed the remarkable honor of being chosen by three young immor- 
tal damsels, very lightly dressed, as sovereign arbiter of an import- 
ant question. 
The Chase is the only branch of industry where the importance 
of the function is measured by talent and capacity, where facetious 
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