to create, in the medium of stone, the likeness or impression of the Human Soul in its grandeur and majesty; to make hard granite or syenite proclaim the eternal peace and aloofness of the Soul.—­Plato speaks of those glimpses of “the other side of the sky” which the soul catches before it comes into the flesh;—­the Egyptian artist was preoccupied with the other side of the sky.  How wonderfully he succeeded, you have only to drop into the British Museum to see.  There is a colossal head there, hung high on the wall facing the stairs at the end of the Egyptian Gallery; you may view it from the ground, or from any point on the stairs; but from whatever place you look at it, if you have any quality of the Soul in you, you go away having caught large glimpses of the other side of the sky.  You are convinced, perhaps unconsciously, of the grandeur and reality of the Soul.  Having watched Eternity on that face many times, I rejoiced to find this description of it in De Quincey;—­if he was not speaking of this, what he says fits it admirably: 

“That other object which for four and twenty years in the British Museum struck me as simply the sublimest sight which in this sight-seeing world I had seen.  It was the memnon’s head, then recently brought from Egypt.  I looked at it, as the reader must suppose in order to understand the depth which I have here ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a symbolic head; and what it symbolized to me were:  (1) the peace which passeth understanding. (2) The eternity which baffles and confounds all faculty of computation—­the eternity which had been, the eternity which was to be. (3) The diffusive love, not such as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and swells by undulations of time, but a procession, an emanation, from some mystery of endless dawn.  You durst not call it a smile that radiated from those lips; the radiation was too awful to clothe itself in adumbrations of memorials of flesh.”

Art can never reach higher than that,—­if we think of it as a factor in human evolution.  What else you may say of Egyptian sculpture is of minor importance:  as, that it was stiff, conventional, or what not; that each figure is portrayed sitting bolt upright, hands out straight, palms down, upon the knees, and eyes gazing into eternity.  Ultimately we must regard Art in this Egyptian way:  as a thing sacred, a servant of the Mysteries; the revealer of the Soul and the other side of the sky.  You may have enormous facility in playing with your medium; may be able to make your marble quite fluidic, and flow into innumerable graceful forms; you may be past master of every intricacy, multiplying your skill to the power of n;—­but you will still in reality have made no progress beyond that unknown carver who shaped his syenite, or his basalt, into the “peace which passeth understanding”—­“the eternity which baffles and confounds all faculty of computation.”