And so, blessed are the shadows of porches and cloisters!  Blessed the hours of serene meditation, when the “tender grace of days that are dead,” of flowers that have faded, of scenes “gone glimmering through the dream of things that were,” comes back to us with a new meaning, softening and refining the heart to unexpected capacities of affection.  But how they fade away, these ghostly and unsubstantial pageants, when they “scent the morning air”!  How they leave in our hearts nought but the dim consciousness that we are capable of an existence ineffably deeper and vaster than that which we lead in the visible world!  Nought but this?  Alas, poor human nature! do we leave the casket of Pandora open in wanton carelessness, and let all escape but the mere scent of the roses?  Or does there not remain, behind an indefinable presence to comfort and console us,—­the precious Ideal of Beauty,—­

  “The light that never was on sea or land,
  The inspiration and the poet’s dream”?

The human heart forever yearns to create,—­this is the pure antique word for it,—­to give expression and life to an evasive loveliness that haunts the soul in those moments when the body is laid asleep and the spirit walks.  There is a continual and godlike longing to embody these elusive phantoms of Beauty.  But the immortal songs which remain unsung, the exquisite idyls which gasp for words, the bewildering and restless imagery which seeks in vain the eternal repose of marble or of canvas,—­while these confess the affectionate and divine desires of humanity, they prove how few there are to whom it is given to learn the great lesson of Creation.  When one arises among us, who, like Pygmalion, makes no useless appeal to the Goddess of Beauty for the gift of life for his Ideal, and who creates as he was created, we cherish him as a great interpreter of human love.  We call him poet, composer, artist, and speak of him reverently as Master.  We say that his lips have been wet with dews of Hybla,—­that, like the sage of Crotona, he has heard the music of the spheres,—­that he comes to us, another Numa, radiant and inspired from the kisses of Egeria.

Thus, as infinite Love begets infinite Beauty, so does infinite Beauty reflect into finite perceptions that image of its divine parentage which the antique world worshipped under the personification of Astarte, Aphrodite, Venus, and recognized as the great creative principle lying at the root of all high Art.

There is a curious passage in Boehme, which relates how Satan, when asked the cause of the enmity of God and his own consequent downfall, replied,—­“I wished to be an Artist.”  So, according to antique tradition, Prometheus manufactured a man and woman of clay, animated them with fire stolen from the chariot of the Sun, and was punished for the crime of Creation; Titans chained him to the rocks of the Indian Caucasus for thirty thousand years!