rope. I could not understand it, for I
came in an idle mood, no more interested in it than in scores of other
wonders I was thirsting to see; Luxor, Karnak, Philae, Denderah--all
of those invited me quite as much as the Acropolis, but here I was
speechless with surprise at my own emotion, I can imagine that such
violence of feeding might turn a child into a woman, a boy into a man.
All at once I saw the whole of Greek art in its proper setting. The
Venus of Milo was no longer in the Louvre against its red background,
where French taste has placed it, the better to set it off. Its cold,
proud beauty was here again in Greece; the Hermes at Olympia; the
Wingless Victory from the temple of Nike Apteros, made wingless that
victory might never depart from Athens; the lovelier Winged Victory
from the Louvre, with her electric poise, the most exhilarating, the
most inspiring, the most intoxicating Victory the world has ever
known, was loosed from her marble prison, and was again breathing the
pure air of her native hills. Their white figures came crowding into
my mind.

The learning of the philosophers of Greece; the "plain living and high
thinking" they taught; the unspeakable purity of her art; the
ineffable manner in which her masters reproduced the idea of the
stern, cold pride of aloofness in these sublime types of perfect men,
wrung my heart with a sense of personal loss. I can imagine that
Pygmalion felt about Galatea as I felt that first hour in the
Acropolis. I can imagine that a woman who had loved with the passion
of her life a man of matchless integrity, of superb pride, of lofty
ideals, and who had lost that love irretrievably through a fault of
her own, whose gravity she first saw through his eyes when it was too
late, might have felt as I felt in that hour. All the agony of a
hopeless love for an art which never can return; all the sense of
personal loss for the purity which I was completely realizing for the
first time when it was too late; all the intense longing to have the
dead past live again, that I might prove myself more worthy of it,
assailed me with as mighty a force as ever the human heart could
experience and still continue to beat. The piteous fragments of this
lost art which remained--a few columns, the remnants of an immortal
frieze, the long lines of drapery from which the head and figure were
gone, the cold brow of the Hermes, the purity of his profile, the
proud curve of his lips, the ineffable