These two tendencies, then, met and struggled and were harmonised in the supreme imagination, of Pheidias, in sculpture--of Aeschylus, in the drama. Hence, a series of wondrous personalities, of which the Greek imagination became the dwelling-place; beautiful, perfectly understood human outlines, embodying a strange, delightful, lingering sense of clouds and water and sun. Such a world, the world of really imaginative Greek sculpture, we still see, reflected in many a humble vase or battered coin, in Bacchante, and Centaur, and Amazon; [36] evolved out of that "vasty deep"; with most command, in the consummate fragments of the Parthenon; not, indeed, so that he who runs may read, the gifts of Greek sculpture being always delicate, and asking much of the receiver; but yet visible, and a pledge to us, of creative power, as, to the worshipper, of the presence, which, without that material pledge, had but vaguely haunted the fields and groves. This, then, was what the Greek imagination did for men's sense and experience of natural forces, in Athene, in Zeus, in Poseidon; for men's sense and experience of their own bodily qualities--swiftness, energy, power of concentrating sight and hand and foot on a momentary physical act--in the close hair, the chastened muscle, the perfectly poised attention of the quoit-player; for men's sense, again, of ethical qualities--restless idealism, inward vision, power of presence through that vision in scenes behind the experience of ordinary men--in the idealised Alexander. To illustrate this function of the imagination, as especially developed in Greek art, we may reflect on what happens with us in the use of certain names, as expressing summarily, this name for you and that for me--Helen, Gretchen, Mary--a hundred associations, trains of sound, forms, impressions, remembered in all sorts of degrees, which, through a very wide and full experience, they have the power of bringing with [37] them; in which respect, such names are but revealing instances of the whole significance, power, and use of language in general. Well,--the mythical conception, projected at last, in drama or sculpture, is the name, the instrument of the identification, of the given matter,--of its unity in variety, its outline or definition in mystery; its spiritual form, to use again the expression I have borrowed from William Blake--form, with hands, and lips, and opened eyelids--spiritual, as conveying to us, in that, the soul of rain, or of a Greek river, or of swiftness, or purity.