omit; when we look at his Apollo or his Aphrodite we see not a naked body but a divine presence. The effect of divinity is not furnished by any anatomical member, nor interfered with by any. The body in detail is before us, but the expression, the something divine we feel, is in the attitude or the character. The wise poet, knowing the limitations and dangers of his medium, tries to reproduce only the attitude or the character. Later sculptors, in the decadence that followed the Periclean age, deserted the decorum of their own medium, and called attention to separate parts of the body—to ribs or veins, neck or breasts. In literature a parallel decadence occurred; the poets tried to give the effect of beauty, not in Homer’s way, by avoiding physical detail, but by citing it. They managed to suggest not beauty but sex. The modern lover of beauty who quite properly wishes to restore the body to its rightful honor and reverence, usually appeals to the Greeks for his precedent. But if he wishes to celebrate the body in detail, he should appeal not to the Greeks but to the poets of the Renaissance. The praise of the body in the Renaissance is sometimes explained as springing from a newly recovered delight in material beauty. It should also be explained as a reaction, on the part of earnest, even puritanical moralists, against other moralists who, they thought, viewed life but partially and cramped the human soul. In our own language, Edmund Spenser and John Milton led in this praise of beauty—moralists both; as in modern times Walt Whitman led the praise, a moralist also, whether or not his detractors admit it. But a moral purpose is a dangerous approach to art, whether you are a critic or a poet. Whitman is perhaps the easiest illustration to begin with. He felt that to the pure every part of the body is sacred, and at its best is a thing of beauty. Had he been a sculptor, he would have proceeded to make statues which probably would have shocked nobody. Working in language, however, he mistook the decorum of the art, and wrote as though he were sculptor or painter, and the result is in those anatomical catalogues from which no beauty emerges, whatever else does. He differs as widely as possible from Edmund Spenser in most things, but in this one matter they are alike. Milton was too close to the Greeks to go wrong, even with his moral impulse to assert the honor of the body; his impassioned praise of wedded love, and his remarks on the glory of nakedness when Adam and Eve first appear in his epic, put no strain on literary decorum. But Spenser’s moral enthusiasm for beauty leads to such physical inventories as his picture of Belphœbe, in the second book of the _Faerie Queene_, or of his own bride, in the _Amoretti_ and the _Epithalamium_—an accounting of eyes, teeth, hair, neck, shoulders, breasts, waist, arms and legs. Many a critic has suggested that his poems have the character of painting or of tapestry,