Ae in the Irish Theosophist

It was long ago, so long that only the spirit of earth remembers truly. The old shepherd Tithonius sat before the door of his hut waiting for his grandson to return. He watched with drowsy eyes the eve gather, and the woods and mountains grow dark over the isles -- the isles of ancient Greece. It was Greece before its day of beauty, and day was never lovelier. The cloudy blossoms of smoke curling upward from the valley sparkled a while high up in the sunlit air, a vague memorial of the world of men below. From that too the colour vanished, and those other lights began to shine which to some are the only lights of day. The skies dropped close upon the mountains and the silver seas, like a vast face brooding with intentness; there was enchantment, mystery, and a living motion in its depths, the presence of all-pervading Zeus enfolding his starry children with the dark radiance of aether.

"Ah! " murmured the old man, looking upward, "once it was living; once it spoke to me. It speaks not now, but it speaks to others I know -- to the child who looks and longs and trembles in the dewy night. Why does he linger now? He is beyond his hour. Ah, there now are his footsteps!"