Nothing is more inspiring. Such must have been the mythology of the worthy Homer when his hearers in the Cyclades still believed in Aphrodite and Pallas, in the Dioscuri and the Centaurs, of whom he spoke to them and wrung from them tears of sheer delight. Thus our poets make us weep, when they speak to us now of azure skies, of the sea-girt horizon, of the perfume of roses, of the song of birds, of all those objects that our eye has never seen, our ear has never heard, of which all our senses are ignorant, yet our mind conjures them up within us by a strange instinct at the least suggestion of love. And when our painters show us these horses whose legs grow ever slimmer, these swans whose necks become ever rounder and longer, these vines whose leaves and branches grow ever more intricate with their lace-like edges and arabesques interwoven round still more exquisite birds, a matchless emotion rises within us such as a young Greek might have felt before a bas-relief crowded with fauns and nymphs or with Argonautes bearing off the Golden Fleece, or with Nereids sporting around the cup of Amphitrite. If our architecture in spite of all its splendours seems but a simple foil of our other fine arts, they in their turn, however admirable, have the air of being barely worthy to illustrate our poetry and literature graven on stone. But in our poetry and even in our literature there are glories which in comparison with less obvious beauty are as the corona is to the ovary, or the frame to the picture. Read our romantic dramas and epics in which all ancient history is magically unrolled down to the heroic struggle and love story of Miltiades. You will decide that nothing more sublime could ever be written. Read also our idylls, our elegies, our epigrams inspired by antiquity, and our poetry of every kind written in a dozen dead languages which when desired revive in order to vivify with their clear notes and their manifold harmonies, the pleasure of our ear, to accompany, so to say, with their rich orchestration in English, German, Swedish, Arabic, Italian and French, the music of our pure Attic. You will imagine nothing more fascinating than this renaissance and transfiguration of forgotten idioms, once the glory of antiquity. As for our dramas and our poems which are often at once the collective and individual work of a school, incarnate in its chief and animated with a single idea like the sculptures of the Parthenon, there is nothing comparable in the masterpieces of Sophocles or Homer. What the extinct species of nature formerly alive are to our painters and sculptors, the no less extinct sentiments of former human nature are to our dramatists. Jealousy, ambition, patriotism, fanaticism, the mad lust of battle, the exalted love of family, the pride of an illustrious name, all the vanished passions of the heart when called up upon the stage, no longer cause tears or terror in a