They are as imperishable as stars and suns and rainbows and landscapes, since these unfold new beauties as the mind and soul rest upon them.  Whenever, then, man creates an image or a picture which reveals these eternal but indescribable beauties, and calls forth wonder or enthusiasm, and excites refined pleasures, he is an artist.  He impresses, to a greater or less degree, every order and class of men.  He becomes a benefactor, since he stimulates exalted sentiments, which, after all, are the real glory and pride of life, and the cause of all happiness and virtue,—­in cottage or in palace, amid hard toils as well as in luxurious leisure.  He is a self-sustained man, since he revels in ideas rather than in praises and honors.  Like the man of virtue, he finds in the adoration of the deity he worships his highest reward.  Michael Angelo worked preoccupied and rapt, without even the stimulus of praise, to advanced old age, even as Dante lived in the visions to which his imagination gave form and reality.  Art is therefore not only self-sustained, but lofty and unselfish.  It is indeed the exalted soul going forth triumphant over external difficulties, jubilant and melodious even in poverty and neglect, rising above all the evils of life, revelling in the glories which are impenetrable, and living—­for the time—­in the realm of deities and angels.  The accidents-of earth are no more to the true artist striving to reach and impersonate his ideal of beauty and grace, than furniture and tapestries are to a true woman seeking the beatitudes of love.  And it is only when there is this soul longing to reach the excellence conceived, for itself alone, that great works have been produced.  When Art has been prostituted to pander to perverted tastes, or has been stimulated by thirst for gain, then inferior works only have been created.  Fra Angelico lived secluded in a convent when he painted his exquisite Madonnas.  It was the exhaustion of the nervous energies consequent on superhuman toils, rather than the luxuries and pleasures which his position and means afforded, which killed Raphael at thirty-seven.

The artists of Greece did not live for utilities any more than did the Ionian philosophers, but in those glorious thoughts and creations which were their chosen joy.  Whatever can be reached by the unaided powers of man was attained by them.  They represented all that the mind can conceive of the beauty of the human form, and the harmony of architectural proportions, In the realm of beauty and grace modern civilization has no prouder triumphs than those achieved by the artists of Pagan antiquity.  Grecian artists have been the teachers of all nations and all ages in architecture, sculpture, and painting.  How far they were themselves original we cannot tell.  We do not know how much they were indebted to Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Assyrians, but in real excellence they have never been surpassed.  In some respects, their works still remain objects