This Ideal, this Aphrodite of old mythologies, still reigns over the world of Art, and every truly noble effort of the artist is saturated with her spirit, as with a religion.  It is impossible for a true work of Art to exist, unless this great creative principle of Love be present in its inception, in its execution, in its detail.  It must be pervaded with the warmth of human, passionate affection.  The skill which we are so apt to worship is but the instrument in the hands of Love.  It is the means by which this humanity is transferred to the work, and there idealized in the forms of Nature.  Thus the test of Art is in our own hearts.  It is not something far away from us, throwing into our presence gleaming reflections from some supernal source of Light and Beauty; but it is very near to us,—­so near, that, like the other blessings which lie at our feet, we overlook it in our far-reaching searches after the imaginary good.  We, poor underlings, have been taught in the school of sad experience the mortal agony of Love without Skill,—­the power of perception, without the power of utterance.  We know how dumb are the sweet melodies of our souls,—­how fleeting their opulent and dreamy pageantries.  But we have not fully learned the utter emptiness and desolation of Skill without Love.  We accept its sounding brass and tinkling cymbals for immortal harmonies.  We look reverently upon its tortured marbles and its canvases stained with academic knowledge as revelations of higher intelligence; forgetting, that, if we go down to the quiet places of our own souls, we shall find there the universe reflected, like a microcosm, in the dark well-springs, and that out of these well-springs in the deep silence rises the beautiful Ideal, Anadyomene, to compensate and comfort us for the vacancy of Life.  If we know ourselves, it is not to the dogmas of critics, the artificial rules of aesthetics, that we most wisely resort for judgments concerning works of Art.  Though technical externals and the address of manipulation naturally take possession of our senses and warp our opinions, there are depths of immortal Truth within us, rarely sounded, indeed, but which can afford a standard and a criterion far nobler than the schools can give us.

The broken statues and columns and traditions and fragmentary classics which Greece has left us are so still and tranquil to the eye and ear, that we search in vain for the Delphic wisdom they contain, till we find it echoed in the sympathetic depths of our souls, and repeated in the half-impalpable Ideals there.  It is to Greece that we must look for the external type of these Ideals, whose existence we but half suspect within us.  It is not pleasant, perhaps, to think that we were nearly unconscious of the highest capacities of our humanity, till we recognized their full expression in the ashes of a distant and dead civilization,—­that we did not know ourselves, till

  “The airy tongues that syllable men’s names
  In pathless wildernesses”