Alas for poor souls, who, in
the heavy anguish of life, had only such goddesses to go to! How far
in advance is even the idolatry of Christianity! how different the
idea of Mary from the Diana!
Yet, as I walked up and down among these remains of Greek art, I could
not but wonder at the spectacle of their civilization: no modern
development reproduces it, nor ever can or will. It is well to cherish
and make much of that ethereal past, as a specimen of one phase of
humanity, for it is past _forever_. Those isles of Greece, with
their gold and purple haze of light and shadow, their exquisite,
half-spiritual, half-bodily formation--islands where flesh and blood became
semi-spiritual, and where the sense of beauty was an existence--have
passed as a vision of glory, never to return. One scarcely realizes
how full of poetry was their mythology; all successive ages have drawn
on it for images of beauty without exhausting it; and painters and
artists, to this day, are fettered and repressed by vain efforts to
reproduce it. But as a religion for the soul and the heart, all this
is vain and void; all powerless to give repose or comfort.
Pages:
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522