entity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally
obvious. There is, at the surface, infinite variety of things; at the
centre there is simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man
in which we recognize the same character! Observe the sources of our
information in respect to the Greek genius. We have the civil history of
that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given
it; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were and
what they did. We have the same national mind expressed for us again in
their literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very
complete form. Then we have it once more in their architecture, a beauty
as of temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the square,--a
builded geometry. Then we have it once again in sculpture, the "tongue
on the balance of expression," a multitude of forms in the utmost
freedom of action and never transgressing the ideal serenity; like
votaries performing some religious dance before the gods, and, though in
convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and
decorum of their dance. Thus of the genius of one remarkable people we
have a fourfold representation: and to the senses what more unlike than
an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and
the last actions of Phocion?

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any
resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder. A particular
picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same train of images,
will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild mountain walk,
although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the senses, but is
occult and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature is an endless
combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old
well-known air through innumerable variations.

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works,
and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected
quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest which at
once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the
brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose manners have
the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the
friezes of the Parthenon and the remains of the earliest Greek art. And
there are compositions of the same strain to be found in the books of
all