crowning the serene Atlas-labor of the column with exquisite glory, and uniting the upright and horizontal masses of the order with a marriage ring, whose beauty is its perfect fitness.  The profile of this moulding may be rudely likened to the upper and middle parts of the line assumed as the representative of the Greek Ideal.  But it varied ever with the exigency of circumstances.  Over the short and solid shafts of Paestum, it became flat and almost horizontal; they needed there an expression of emphatic and sudden grace; they meet the abacus with a moulding of passionate energy, in which the soft undulations of Beauty are nearly lost in a masculine earnestness of purpose.  On the other hand, the more slender and feminine columns of the Parthenon glide into the echinus with gentleness and sweetness, crown themselves with a diadem of chastity, as if it grew there by Fate, preordained from the base of the shaft, like a flower from the root.  It was created as with “the Dorian mood of soft recorders.”  Between these two extremes there is an infinity of change, everywhere modified and governed by “the study of imagination.”

The same characteristics of nervous grace and severe intellectual restraint are found wherever the true Greek artist put his hand and his heart to work.  Every moulding bears the impress of utter refinement, and modulates the light which falls upon it with exquisite and harmonious gradations of shade.  The sun, as it touches it, makes visible music there, as if it were the harp of Memnon,—­now giving us a shadow-line sharp, strict, and defined, now drawing along a beam of quick and dazzling light, and now dying away softly and insensibly into cool shade again.  All the phenomena of reflected lights, half lights, and broken lights are brought in and attuned to the great daedal melody of the edifice.  The antiquities of Attica afford nothing frivolous or capricious or merely fanciful, no playful extravagances or wanton meanderings of line; but ever loyal to the purity of a high Ideal, they present to us, even from their ruins, a wonderful and very evident Unity of expression, pervading and governing every possible mood and manner of thought.  No phase of Art that ever existed gives us a line so very human and simple in itself as this Greek type, and so pliable to all the uses of monumental language.  If this type were a mere mathematical type, its applicability to the expression of human emotions would be limited to a formalism absolutely fatal to the freedom of thought in Art.  But because it has its birth in intense Love, in refined appreciation of all the movements of Life and all the utterances of Creation, because it is the humanized essence of these motions and developments, it becomes thus an inestimable Unity, containing within itself the germs of a new world of ever new delight.