There are, as has already been observed,[928] three periods in the history of art: 1st. that, in which the necessary is sought; 2ndly, that in which the study of the beautiful is pursued; and 3dly, the period of superfluity and extravagance. But in some countries men appear to pass from the first to the third, without traversing the second. Thus, in Egypt, Persia, Etruria, in Germany, Holland, France, England[929] the wild, the grotesque, the terrible have been aimed at, seldom the beautiful. Even in Italy, where in modern times art has taken firmest root and most luxuriantly flourished, the object sought to be attained has lain on a lower level. Among the northern nations the grotesque variously disguised or modified is the spirit of art; among the Italians it is voluptuousness, among the Greeks the beautiful. Hence no Greek statue of the flourishing period of art is indecent.[930] Naked it may be, but like the nakedness of infancy, it is chaste as a mother’s love. Our thoughts are instantly carried away by it to the regions of poetry; the soft influence of the ideal descends like dew upon our fancy; we are elevated above the region of the passions to heights where all is sunny and calm and pure. The beautiful is chaste as an icicle, yet warm as love. It breathes in Raffaelle’s virgins which we regard as some “bright particular star,” things to inspire a holy affection, a love not akin to earth. Yet this beauty is not distanced from us by its severity: no! but by its intense innocence, by its unsullied purity, by its inexpressible concentration and mingling up of maternity and girlhood. It was this beauty that Milton sought in his Comus to express, when he represents chastity as its own guard. And this is preëminently the spirit breathing through Grecian art. In the Artemis, in the Athena, nay, even in Aphrodite or Leda, or an orgiastic Bacchante, the overruling sense of beauty, after the first flutter of sensation, hurries the imagination far beyond all considerations of sex or passion. The root of all the pleasures we feel, seems to be hidden under the load of three thousand years, not because the things are old, but because they are the material representatives of a period when the foot of the beautiful rested on the earth. Footnote 928: By Winkelmann, Hist. de l’Art, i. 2. Footnote 929: