tiquity evidently proves that it was one of the household tales
of old Greece. It did not seem absurd in those times, when Art was
recognized as a great Unity, an elaborate system of infinite language
founded on the simplest elements of Life, and in its grandest and widest
flowings bearing ever in its bosom, like a great river, the memory
of the little weeping Naiad far up among the mountains with her
"impoverished urn." And so every great national Art, growing up
naturally out of the necessities of an earnest people, expressing the
grand motives of their Life, as that of the Greeks and the Egyptians and
the mediaeval nations of Europe, is founded on the simplest laws. So
long as these laws are obeyed in simplicity and Love, Art is good
and true; so long as it remembers the purity and earnestness of its
childhood, the strength that is ordained out of the mouth of babes is
present in all its expressions; but when it spreads itself abroad in the
fens and marshes of humanity, it has lost the purity of its aim, the
singleness and unity of its action,--it becomes stagnant, and sleeps in
the Death of Idleness.

Therefore I believe in the expressiveness of single lines as symbols of
the grandest phases of human Life. And when one studies Greek Art, the
whole motive of it seems so childlike and so simple that the impulse to
seek for that little Naiad which is the fountain and source of it all is
irresistible. Look at the line I have traced, and see if there is not a
curious humanity about it. It is impossible to produce it with a wanton
flourish of the pencil, as I have done in that wavy, licentious curve,
which Hogarth, in his quaint "Analysis of Beauty," assumes as the line
of true Grace; nor yet are its infinite motions governed by any cold
mathematical laws. In it is the earnest and deliberate labor of Love.
There are thought and tenderness in every instant of it; but this
thought is grave and almost solemn, and this tenderness is chastened and
purified by wise reserve. Measure it by time, and you will find it
no momentary delight, no voluptuous excess which comes and goes in a
breath; but there is a whole cycle of deep human feeling in it. It is
the serene joy of a nation, and not the passionate impulse of a man.
Observe, from beginning to end, its intention is to give expression by
the serpentine line to that sentiment of beautiful Life which was the
worship of the Greeks; but they did not toss it off, like a wine-cup at