There was a most impressive array of pageantry, of processions, a sort of grand ritual, with their arts and their religion broadly blended.

The very babies joined in it.

To see one of their great annual festivals, with the massed and marching stateliness of those great mothers, the young women brave and noble, beautiful and strong; and then the children, taking part as naturally as ours would frolic round a Christmas tree--it was overpowering in the impression of joyous, triumphant life.
They had begun at a period when the drama, the dance, music, religion, and education were all very close together; and instead of developing them in detached lines, they had kept the connection.

Let me try again to give, if I can, a faint sense of the difference in the life view--the background and basis on which their culture rested.
Ellador told me a lot about it.

She took me to see the children, the growing girls, the special teachers.