So, testing your weakness by their strength, Your meagre charms by their rounded beauty, Measured by Art in your breadth and length, You learned--to submit is a mortal’s duty. --When I say “you”, ‘tis the common soul, The collective, I mean: the race of Man That receives life in parts to live in a whole, And grow here according to God’s clear plan. -- St. 14. common: general. 15. Growth came when, looking your last on them all, You turned your eyes inwardly one fine day And cried with a start--What if we so small Be greater and grander the while than they? Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature? In both, of such lower types are we Precisely because of our wider nature; For time, theirs--ours, for eternity. 16. To-day’s brief passion limits their range; It seethes with the morrow for us and more. They are perfect--how else? they shall never change: We are faulty--why not? we have time in store. The Artificer’s hand is not arrested With us; we are rough-hewn, nowise polished. They stand for our copy, and, once invested With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished. 17. ‘Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven-- The better! What’s come to perfection perishes. Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven: Works done least rapidly, Art most cherishes. Thyself shalt afford the example, Giotto! Thy one work, not to decrease or diminish, Done at a stroke, was just (was it not?) “O!” Thy great Campanile is still to finish. -- St. 15-17. “Greek art had ITS lesson to teach, and it taught it. It reasserted the dignity of the human form. It re-stated THE TRUTH of the soul which informs the body, and the body which expresses it. Men saw in its creations their own qualities carried to perfection, and were content to know that such perfection was possible and to renounce the hope of attaining it. In this experience the first stage was progress, the second was stagnation. Progress began again when men looked on these images of themselves and said: ‘we are not inferior to these. We are greater than they. For what has come to perfection perishes, and we are imperfect because eternity is before us; because we were made to GROW.’”--Mrs. Orr’s Handbook to the Works of R. B.