All good work is more or less creative, that is, a co-working with the eternal mind; and work is good and productive in proportion to the intensity of this cooeperation.  Why is it that we so prize a fragment of Phidias, a few lines traced by Raphael?  Because the minds of those workers were, more than the minds of most others, in sympathy with the Infinite mind.  While at work their hands were more distinctly guided by the Almighty hand; they felt and embodied more of the spirit which makes, which is, life.

Here is a frame of canvas, a block of marble, a pile of stones, a vocabulary.  Of the canvas you make a screen, you build a dwelling with the pile of stones, chisel a door-sill out of the block, with the vocabulary you write an essay.  And in each case you work well and creatively, if your work be in harmony with God’s laws, if your screen be light, sightly, and protective, your dwelling healthful and commodious, your sill lie solid and square, your essay be judicious and sound.  But if on the canvas you have a Christ’s head by Leonardo, out of the pile of stones a Strasburg Cathedral, from the block of marble a Venus of Milo, with the vocabulary a tragedy of Hamlet, you have works which are so creative that they tell on the mind with the vivid, impressive, instructive, never-wearying delight of the works of nature.  The men who wrought them were strong to do so through the vigor of their sympathy with what Plato calls the formative principle of the universe, they thereby becoming themselves creators, that is, poets.  And we sacredly guard their creations among our best treasures of human gift, because they are so spiritually alive that whenever we put ourselves in relation with them they animate us, they spiritualize our thoughts; and this they do because the minds whence they issued were radiant centers of ideal power, that is, power to conceive the beautiful.

But what is ideal power? the reader may ask.  He might likewise ask, What is moral power?  And unless he has in his own mind some faculty of moral estimation, no answer will help him.  That which comes to us through feeling cannot be intellectually defined, can only be appreciated through feeling.  By describing its effects and accompaniments we approach to a knowledge of what it is.  By means of a foot-rule you can make clear to every member of a crowd what is the height of the Apollo Belvedere, and the exact length of the statue’s face; and each one can for himself verify the accuracy of your statement.  But not with a like distinctness and vivacity of assent can you get the crowd to go along with you as to the Apollo’s beauty.  Acknowledgment of the beautiful in art implies a degree of culture and a native susceptibility not to be found in every accidental gathering.  Full and sincere assent to your declaration that the statue is very beautiful presupposes a high ideal in the mind; that is, a lofty pre-attained idea of what is manly beauty.  But after all, the want