“O melancholy eyes! 
O vacant eyes! from which the soul has gone
To gaze in other lands,”

bend not upon us, living and loving mortals, that stony stare of death,—­lest we too, as smit with the basilisk, be turned into monumental stone, and all the dear grace and movement of life be lost forever!

“Solid-set,
And moulded in colossal calm,”

all the lines of this lost Art thus recall the sentiment of endless repose, and even the necessary curves of its mouldings are dead with straightness.  The Love which produced these lines was not the passionate Love which we understand and feel; they were not the result of a sensuous impulse; but the Egyptian artist seemed ever to be standing alone in the midst of a trackless and limitless desert,—­around him earth and sky meeting with no kiss of affection, no palpitating embrace of mutual sympathy; he felt himself encircled by a calm and pitiless Destiny, the cold expression of a Fate from which he could not flee, and in himself the centre and soul of it all.  Oppressed thus with a vast sense of spiritual loneliness, when he uttered the inspirations of Art, the memories of playful palms and floating lilies and fluttering wings, though they came warm to the Love of his heart, were attuned in the outward expression to the deep, solemn, prevailing monotone of his humanity.  His Love for the Lotus and the Ibis, more profound than the passion of the senses, dwelt serene in the bottom of his soul, and thence came forth transfigured and dedicated to the very noblest uses of Life.  And this is the Art of Egypt.

But among all the old nations which have perished with their gods, Greece appeals to our closest sympathies.  She looks upon us with the smile of childhood, free, contented, and happy, with no ascetic self-denials to check her wild-flower growth, no stern religion to bind the liberty of her actions.  All her external aspects are in harmony with the weakness and the strength of human nature.  We recognize ourselves in her, and find all the characteristics of our own humanity there developed into a theism so divine, clothed with a personification so exquisite and poetical, that the Hellenic mythology seems still to live in our hearts, a silent and shadowy religion without ceremonies or altars or sacrifices.  The festive gods of the “Iliad” made man a deity to himself, and his soul the dwelling-place of Ideal Beauty.  In this Ideal they lived, and moved and had their being, and came forth thence, bronze, marble, chryselephantine, a statuesque and naked humanity, chaste in uncomprehended sin and glorified in antique virtue.  The Beauty of this natural Life and the Love of it was the soul of the Greek Ideal; and the nation continually cherished and cultivated and refined this Ideal with impulses from groves of Arcadia, vales of Tempe, and flowery slopes of Attica, from the manliness of Olympic Games and the loveliness of Spartan Helens.  They cherished and cultivated and refined it, because here they set up their altars to known gods and worshipped attributes which they could understand.  The Ideal was their religion, and the Art which came from it the expression of their highest aspiration.