n of ideal beauty, but to the influence of great ideas
permeating society,--such as when the age of Phidias was kindled with
the great thoughts of Socrates, Democritus, Thucydides, Euripides,
Aristophanes, and others, whether contemporaries or not; a sort of
Augustan or Elizabethan age, never to appear but once among the
same people.

Now, in reference to the history or development of ancient Art, until it
culminated in the age of Pericles, we observe that its first expression
was in architecture, and was probably the result of religious
sentiments, when nations were governed by priests, and not distinguished
for intellectual life. Then arose the temples of Egypt, of Assyria, of
India. They are grand, massive, imposing, but not graceful or beautiful.
They arose from blended superstition and piety, and were probably
erected before the palaces of kings, and in Egypt by the dynasty that
builded the older pyramids. Even those ambitious and prodigious
monuments, which have survived every thing contemporaneous, indicate the
reign of sacerdotal monarchs and artists who had no idea of beauty, but
only of permanence. They do not indicate civilization, but
despotism,--unless it be that they were erected for astronomical
purposes, as some maintain, rather than as sepulchres for kings. But
this supposition involves great mathematical attainments. It is
difficult to conceive of such a waste of labor by enlightened princes,
acquainted with astronomical and mathematical knowledge and mechanical
forces, for Herodotus tells us that one hundred thousand men toiled on
the Great Pyramid during forty years. What for? Surely it is hard to
suppose that such a pile was necessary for the observation of the polar
star; and still less probably was it built as a sepulchre for a king,
since no covered sarcophagus has ever been found in it, nor have even
any hieroglyphics. The mystery seems impenetrable.

But the temples are not mysteries. They were built also by sacerdotal
monarchs, in honor of the deity. They must have been enormous, perhaps
the most imposing ever built by man: witness the ruins of Karnac--a
temple designated by the Greeks as that of Jupiter Ammon---with its
large blocks of stone seventy feet in length, on a platform one thousand
feet long and three hundred wide, its alleys over a mile in length lined
with colossal sphinxes, and all adorned with obelisks and columns, and
surrounded with courts and colonnades, like Solomon's templ