c and coldly
conventional alphabet? No. Daughter to-day of tradition and no longer of
productive nature, humanised and harmonised, she has a still firmer hold
on the heart. If she recalls to each his day-dreams rather than his
recollections, his imaginings rather than his impressions, his
admiration as an artist rather than his terror as a child, she is only
the better calculated to fascinate and subdue. She has for us the
profound and intimate charm of an old legend, but it is a legend in
which one believes.

Nothing is more inspiring. Such must have been the mythology of the
worthy Homer when his hearers in the Cyclades still believed in
Aphrodite and Pallas, in the Dioscuri and the Centaurs, of whom he spoke
to them and wrung from them tears of sheer delight. Thus our poets make
us weep, when they speak to us now of azure skies, of the sea-girt
horizon, of the perfume of roses, of the song of birds, of all those
objects that our eye has never seen, our ear has never heard, of which
all our senses are ignorant, yet our mind conjures them up within us by
a strange instinct at the least suggestion of love.

And when our painters show us these horses whose legs grow ever slimmer,
these swans whose necks become ever rounder and longer, these vines
whose leaves and branches grow ever more intricate with their lace-like
edges and arabesques interwoven round still more exquisite birds, a
matchless emotion rises within us such as a young Greek might have felt
before a bas-relief crowded with fauns and nymphs or with Argonautes
bearing off the Golden Fleece, or with Nereids sporting around the cup
of Amphitrite.

If our architecture in spite of all its splendours seems but a simple
foil of our other fine arts, they in their turn, however admirable, have
the air of being barely worthy to illustrate our poetry and literature
graven on stone. But in our poetry and even in our literature there are
glories which in comparison with less obvious beauty are as the corona
is to the ovary, or the frame to the picture. Read our romantic dramas
and epics in which all ancient history is magically unrolled down to the
heroic struggle and love story of Miltiades. You will decide that
nothing more sublime could ever be written. Read also our idylls, our
elegies, our epigrams inspired by antiquity, and our poetry of every
kind written in a dozen dead languages which when desired revive in
order to vivify with their clear notes and their man