Lines of Beauty, produced in such a soil, were not, as might at first be supposed, tropic growths of wanton and luxurious curves, wild, spontaneous utterances of superabundant Life.  The finely-studied perception of the Greek artist admitted no merely animal, vegetable, instinctive, licentious renderings of what Nature was ever giving him with a liberal hand in the whorls of shells, the veins of leaves, the life of flames, the convolutions of serpents, the curly tresses of woman, the lazy grace of clouds, the easy sway of tendrils, flowers, and human motion.  He was no literal interpreter of her whispered secrets.  But the Grace of his Art was a deliberate grace,—­a grace of thought and study.  His lines were creations, and not instincts or imitations.  They came from the depth of his Love, and it was his religion so to nurture and educate his sensitiveness to Beauty and his power to love and create it, that his works of Art should be deeds of passionate worship and expressions of a godlike humanity.  Unlike the Egyptian’s, there was nothing in his creed to check the sweet excess of Life, and no grim shadow, “feared of man,” scared him in his walks, or preached to him sermons of mortality in the stones and violets of the wayside.  Life was hallowed and dear to him for its own sake.  He saw it was lovable, and he made it the theme of his noblest poems, his subtilest philosophies, and his highest Art.  Hence the infinite joy and endless laughter on Olympus, the day-long feasting, the silver stir of strings in the hollow shell of the exquisite Phoebus, “the soft song of the Muse with voices sweetly replying.”

I believe that all true Lines of Grace and Beauty, in their highest, intellectual, human significance, may be concentrated and expressed in one; not a precise and exact line, like a formula of mathematics, to which the neophyte can refer for deductions of Grace to suit any premises or conditions.  This, of course, is contrary to the spirit of beautiful design; and the ingenious Hay,—­who maintains that his “composite ellipse” is capable of universal application in the arts of ornamental composition, and that by its use any desirable lines in mouldings or vases can be mechanically produced, especially Greek lines, falls into the grave error of endeavoring to materialize and fix that animula vagula, blandula, that coy and evasive spirit of Art, which is its peculiar characteristic, and gives to its works inspiration, harmony, and poetic sentiment.  Ideal Beauty can be hatched from no geometrical eggs.  But the line which I refer to, as the expression of most subtile Grace, pretends to be merely a type of that large language of forms with which the most refined intellects of antiquity uttered their Love, and their joyful worship of Aphrodite.  This line, of course, is Greek.

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