Wordsworth, Christopher: Greece: pictorial, descriptive and historical (London, 1840)

GRECIAN MYTHOLOGY.

cules

; and the establishment of his war-
ship in Arcadia was thus produced by the I
subterranean passage of the Stymphalian ]
lake into the passage of the Erasinus. We ;
may refer to the influence of similar causes
on the social and moral character„on the v ■
pursuits and tastes, of the inhabitants of the

same country. The soil of this division of the Peloponnesus was such as to
afford little encouragement to the agriculturist. Its mountain tops are covered
with snow for the greater part of the year, and its plains themselves, such as
those of Tegea, Mantinea, and Megalopolis, are rather flat surfaces on the ele-
vations of hills, than warm and fruitful lowlands, where a rich alluvial soil is
deposited by the contributions of fertilizing streams, or which are sheltered by
the protection of umbrageous forests, or refreshed by the mild breezes of the sea.
The temperature and soil of such provinces as Baeotia and Thessaly, in the
continent of Greece, were almost without a parallel in the Peloponnesus;
much less could they be rivalled within the limit3 of Arcadia. From the
circumstances which have been detailed, it arose that the life of the inha-
bitants of that country was necessarily pastoral. The same leisure and free-
dom, and familiarity with grand and beautiful scenes, which such an exist-
ence in a fine country supplies in abundance, and which has produced the
mountain melodies of Switzerland and the Tyrol, made, in earlier times, the