As the eye is cheated out of its rectitude, following this grave delight, and seems to dilate and grow dreamy in the cool shade of imaginative cloisters and groves, the wanton joyousness of Life, with its long waving lily-stems and the luscious pending of vines, comes with dim recollections into the mind, but modified by a certain habitual chastity of thought.  Follow the line still farther, and you will find it grateful to the sight, neither fatiguing with excess of monotony nor cloying the appetite with change.  And when the round hour is full and the end comes, this end is met by a Fate, which does not clip with the shears of Atropos and leave an aching void, but fulfils itself in gentleness and peace.  The line bends quietly and unconsciously towards the beautiful consummation, and then dies, because its work is done.

This is the way the Greeks made that Line which represents to “the capable eye” the true Attic civilization.  And when we examine the innumerable lines of Grecian architecture, we find that they never for an instant lost sight of this Ideal.  The fine humanity of it was everywhere present, and mingled not only with such grand and heroic lines as those of the sloping pediments and long-drawn entablatures of the Parthenon and Theseion, bending them into curves so subtilely modulated that our coarse perceptions did not perceive the variations from the dead straight lines till the careful admeasurements of Penrose and Cockerel and their confreres of France assured us of the fact,—­not only did it make these enormous harp-strings vibrate with deep human soul-music, but there is not an abstract line in moulding, column, or vase, belonging to old Greece or the islands of the Aegean or Ionia or the colonies of Italy, which does not have the same intensity of meaning, the same statuesque Life of thought.  Besides, I very much doubt if the same line, in all its parts and proportions, is ever repeated twice,—­certainly not with any emphasis; and this is following out the great law of our existence, which varies the emotion infinitely with the occasion which produced it.  Let us suppose, for example, that a moulding was needed to crown a column with fitting glory and grace.  Now the capital of a column may fairly be called the throne of Ideal expression; it is the cour d’honneur of Art.  The architect in this emergency did not set himself at “the antique,” and seek for authorities, and reproduce and copy; for he desired not only an abstract line of Beauty there, but a line which in every respect should answer all the requirements of its peculiar position, a line which should have its individual and essential relationships with the other lines around it, those of shaft, architrave, frieze, and cornice, should swell its fitting melody into the great fugue.  And so, between the summit of the long shaft and that square block, the abacus, on which reposes the dead weight of the lintel of Greece, the Doric echinus was fashioned,