the Seasons, and the Graces around him; his feet on the mysterious Sphinx; and on his face that marvellous expression of blended majesty and sweetness, which we know not only by the accounts of eyewitnesses, but by the numerous imitations and copies in marble which have come down to us.  One cannot fail to see, even in these copies, a wonderful expression of power, wisdom, and goodness.  The head, with leonine locks of hair and thickly rolling beard, expresses power, the broad brow and fixed gaze of the eyes, wisdom; while the sweet smile of the lips indicates goodness.  The throne was of cedar, ornamented with gold, ivory, ebony, and precious stones.  The sceptre was composed of every kind of metal.  The statue was forty feet high, on a pedestal of twelve feet.  To die without having seen this statue was regarded by the Greeks as almost as great a calamity as not to have been initiated into the mysteries.[240]

In like manner the poetic conception of Apollo was inferior to that of the sculptor.  In the mind of the latter Phoebus is not merely an archer, not merely a prophet and a singer, but the entire manifestation of genius.  He is inspiration; he radiates poetry, music, eloquence from his sublime figure.  The Phidian Jupiter is lost to us, except in copies, but in the Belvedere Apollo we see how the sculptor could interpret the highest thought of the Hellenic mind.  He who visits this statue by night in the Vatican Palace at Rome, seeing it by torchlight, has, perhaps, the most wonderful impression left on his imagination which art can give.  After passing through the long galleries of the Vatican, where, as the torches advance, armies of statues emerge from the darkness before you, gaze on you with marble countenance, and sink back into the darkness behind, you reach at last the small circular hall which contains the Apollo.  The effect of torchlight is to make the statue seem more alive.  One limb, one feature, one expression after another, is brought out as the torches move; and the wonderful form becomes at last instinct with life.  Milman has described the statue in a few glowing but unexaggerated lines:—­

“For mild he seemed, as in Elysian towers,
Wasting, in careless ease, the joyous hours;
Haughty, as bards have sung, with princely sway
Curbing the fierce flame-breathing steeds of day;
Beauteous, as vision seen in dreamy sleep
By holy maid, on Delphi’s haunted steep.”

* * * * *

All, all divine; no struggling muscle glows,
Through heaving vein no mantling life-blood flows,
But, animate with Deity alone,
In deathless glory lives the breathing stone."[241]

In such a statue we see the human creative genius idealized.  It is a magnificent representation of the mind of Greece, that fountain of original thought from which came the Songs of Homer and the Dialogues of Plato, that unfailing source of history, tragedy, lyric poetry, scientific investigation.  In the Belvedere Apollo we see expressed at once the genius of Homer, Aristotle, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Pindar, Thales, and Plato.