It was in the attempt, however, to chain this spirit, and to imprison it in durable forms, that all the poetry and arts of Greece consisted. They beheld within them a world of loveliness, of living forms which knocked at the golden door of fancy, and demanded their dismissal from the spiritual to the material universe. All their studies were but how to dress these celestial habitants in fitting habiliments to go abroad in; and their lives were often spent in the throes of creatures big with immortal beauty. It is a privilege to the world to converse with minds of such a nature. It is ennobling to approach them. Their energy, their vivifying power continues ever active, ever operating, and if high art be ever to flourish and command, not admiration, but love in England, it can only be by kindling here the lamp removed from Greece, but essentially Greek, that is, essentially beautiful. The proof that religion issued with art from the same womb in Greece, and was not its parent, is supplied by every other country. There is religion elsewhere, while nowhere is there art like that of the Greeks. But religion had nevertheless much to do with the forms in which the creative faculty there developed itself, as it invariably has with whatever is great or beautiful among men. The persuasion arose in them that the inhabitants of Olympos could be represented by material forms, and as they found their own reverence for the divine being represented, augment in proportion to the beauty or grandeur of its image, the conclusion was natural that the deity himself would be pleased by the same rule, so that their piety was their first and most powerful incentive to excellence. They hoped to recommend themselves to the gods, as they did to their countrymen, by the greatness of their workmanship; and veneration from without, and piety from within, united in urging them forward. And this, with the poet equally as with the artist, inflamed the desire to excel.