Man needs companionship always, and the creative and imaginative make to themselves companions of their own ideas, and clothe them in material forms to render the illusion more complete. There is an impassioned intercourse between the soul and its offspring. We love nothing like that which has sprung from ourselves, and in this we are truly the image of God, who saw all things that he had made, and, behold, they were very good. And he loved his creation; and from him we inherit, as his children, the love we bear to our creations. Hence the enthusiasm for art, hence the power and the inspiration of poetry. They are not things of earth. They are the seeds of immortality ripening prematurely here below; and therefore we should love them. They are the warrant, the proof that we are of God; that we are born to exercise an irresistible sway over the elements; that our thrones are building elsewhere; that in the passion for whatever is spiritual we exhibit instinctively indubitable tokens that spirits we are, and in a spiritual world only can find our home. It does not belong to this work to attempt a history of Grecian art, which in a certain sense has been already written. My object, if I can accomplish it, is to describe the spirit by which that art was created and sustained, and this I should do triumphantly if love were synonymous with power; for never, since the fabled artist hung enamoured over the marble he had fashioned, did any man’s imagination cleave more earnestly to the spirit that presided over Grecian art, not the plastic merely but every form of it, from the epic in poetry and sculpture down to the signet ring and the drinking song. But the thing is an ample apology for the enthusiasm. There, if anywhere, we discover the culminating point of human intellect and human genius;—there “The vision and the faculty divine” meet us at every step. Even the fragments of her literature and her art are gathered up and treasured in all civilised countries, as if the fate of our race were mystically bound up in them. And so it is: for when we cease to love the beautiful, of which they are the most perfect realisation we know, our own race of glory and greatness will have been run: we shall be close on the verge, nay, within the pale of barbarism. Socrates used to say, that whatever we know we can explain; but not so always with what we feel. There is in the ideal of beauty, which formed the vivifying principle of Greek art, a certain subtile and fugitive delicacy, a certain nameless grace, a certain volatile and fleeting essence, which defy definition, and, rejecting the aid of language, persist in presenting themselves naked to the mind. And by the mind only, and only, moreover, by the inspired mind, can they be discerned.