I must not forget here the two odes of Anacreon wherein he analyzes the beauty of his mistress and of Bathyllus.[136] The device which he uses entirely justifies the analysis. He imagines that he has before him a painter who is working from his description. “Thus paint me the hair,” he says; “thus the brow, the eyes, the mouth; thus the neck and bosom, the thighs and hands.” As the artist could execute but one detail at a time, the poet was obliged to give them to him thus piecemeal. His object is not to make us see and feel, in these spoken directions to the painter, the whole beauty of the beloved object. He is conscious of the inadequacy of all verbal expression; and for that reason summons to his aid the expression of art, whose power of illusion he so extols, that the whole song seems rather a eulogium of art than of his lady. He sees not the picture but herself, and fancies she is about to open her mouth to speak. ἀπέχει· βλέπω γὰρ αὐτήν. τάχα, κηρέ, καὶ λαλήσεις. So, too, in his ode to Bathyllus, the praises of the beautiful boy are so mingled with praises of art and the artist, that we are in doubt in whose honor the song was really written. He selects the most beautiful parts from various pictures, the parts for which the pictures were remarkable. He takes the neck from an Adonis, breast and hands from a Mercury, the thighs from a Pollux, the belly from a Bacchus, until he has the whole Bathyllus as a finished Apollo from the artist’s hand. μετὰ δὲ πρόσωπον ἔστω, τὸν Ἀδώνιδος παρελθὼν, ἐλεφάντινος τράχηλος· μεταμάζιον δὲ ποίει διδύμας τε χεῖρας Ἑρμοῦ, Πολυδεύκεος δὲ μηρούς, Διονυσίην δὲ νηδύν. · · · · · τὸν Ἀπόλλωνα δὲ τοῦτον καθελών, ποίει Βάθυλλον. Thus Lucian, to give an idea of the beauty of Panthea, points to the most beautiful female statues by the old sculptors.[137] What is this but a confession that here language of itself is powerless; that poetry stammers, and eloquence grows dumb, unless art serve as interpreter. XXI. But are we not robbing poetry of too much by taking from her all pictures of physical beauty? Who seeks to take them from her? We are only warning her against trying to arrive at them by a particular road, where she will blindly grope her way in the footsteps of a sister art without ever reaching the goal. We are not closing against her other roads whereon art can follow only with her eyes.