Or you, who unveil from its marble tomb that figure of a chained and stainless woman, whose atmosphere is as a nun's veil, whose sad divinity is a crown,--do you dare imagine that the holy despair you have imaged, the pause of a saint's resignation and a martyr's courage, is but the outline and the faultless contour of a stone? Come back, Pygmalion, from your mythic sleep! return, Art's divinest mystery, germ of all its power, from the deep dust of ages! and teach these modern men that his story whose passion fired a statue's breast was but an immortal fable, a similitude of the truth you feel, but do not see,--that even as our Creator shared His life with His creatures, so do you pour, in far less measure, but obedient to that precedent which is law, your own life and the magnetic instincts of that life, into what you create! Keep your hearts pure and your hands clean, therefore; for these things that you sell for dead shall one day livingly confront you, and tell their own story of your life and your nature with terrible honesty to men and angels. But whoever, in those mystic ages that have ceased to be historic and have become mythic, whoever made the Sphinx,--whether it were some Titaness sequestered from all her kind by genie-spells, forced to live amid these desert solitudes, fed from the abundant hands of Nature, and taught by dreams inspired and twilight visions,-- "A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, And most divinely fair"; her only image of human beauty the reflex of her white, symmetric limbs, her wide, dark eyes, her full lips and soft Egyptian features, wherewith the river greeted her from its blue placidity; her only sense of love the unspoken yearning within, when the soft, tumultuous stress of the west-wind kissed her, who should have been clasped in tender arms and caressed by loving lips; whose dumb, creative instincts, becoming genius instead of maternity, struggled outward from their home in heart and brain to culminate in this world's-wonder, and so build a monument namelessly splendid to the grand nature that found its bread of life was a stone and perished: or whether this creature were the fashioning of some demigod,--"for there were giants in those days,"--who, in the fulness of his strength, despairing of a mortal mate, wandered away from men and wrought his patience and his longing into the rock,--as lesser men have carved their memorials on hard Fate,--and then died between its paws, sated with labor and glad to sleep: or whether, indeed, the captive spirits, sealed in Caucasus with the seal of Solomon, did penance for their rebellion in mortal work on mere dull matter, and with anguished essence toiled for ages to mimic in her own clay the dumb pathos of waiting Earth:--whichever of these dreams be nearest truth, one thing is true,--that the maker of the Sphinx infused into his work, in as much greater measure as his nature was greater than that of other men, that