But it was only an artificial spring, a work of the gardener, not of the
sun, and the trees and flowers were in close pots, and a glass canopy
protected them from cold and northern winds.

In the world's history no event is the direct result of another; all
events rather exert a mutual influence. It was by no means due only to
the Greek scholars who emigrated to Europe after the fall of Byzantium
that a love for Grecian culture and the desire to imitate it became so
general among us; a similar Protestantism prevailed then in art as well
as in life. Leo X., that splendid Medici, was as zealous a Protestant as
Luther, and as there was a Latin prose protest in Wittenberg, so they
protested poetically in Rome in stone, color, and _ottaverime_. And do
not the mighty marble images of Michelangelo, the laughing nymphs of
Giulio Romano, and the joyous intoxication of life in the verses of
Ludovico Ariosto form a protesting opposition to the old, gloomy,
worn-out Catholicism? The painters of Italy waged a polemic against
priestdom which was perhaps more effective than that of the Saxon
theologian. The blooming rosy flesh in the pictures of Titian is all
Protestantism. The limbs of his Venus are more thorough _theses_ than
those which the German monk pasted on the church door of Wittenberg.
Then it was that men felt as if suddenly freed from the force and
pressure of a thousand years; the artists, most of all, again breathed
freely as the nightmare of Christianity seemed to spin whirling from
their breasts, and they threw themselves with enthusiasm into the sea of
Greek joyousness from whose foam rose to them goddesses of beauty.
Painters once more limned the ambrosial joys of Olympus; sculptors
carved, with the joy of yore, old heroes from the marble; poets again
sang the house of Atreus and Laius; and so the age of new classic poetry
began.

As modern life was most perfectly developed in France under Louis XIV.,
so the new classic poetry received there its most finished perfection,
and, in a measure, an independent originality. Through the political
influence of that great king this poetry spread over Europe; in Italy,
its home, it assumed a French color, and thence the heroes of French
tragedy went with the Anjous to Spain; it passed with Henrietta Maria to
England, and we Germans, as a matter of course, built our clumsy temples
to the powdered Olympus of Versailles. The most famous high-priest of
this religion was Gottsche