a feast. They prolonged it through all the varied emotions of a lifetime
with exquisite art, making it the path of their education in childhood
and of their wider experience as men. All the impulses of humanity they
bent to a kindly parallelism with it. This is that famous principle of
Variety in Unity which St. Augustine and hosts of other philosophers
considered the true Ideal of Beauty. Start with this line from the top
upon its journeying: look at the hesitation of it, ere it launches into
action; how it cherishes its resources, and gathers up its strength!--
with a confidence in its beautiful Destiny, and yet a chaste shrinking
from the full enjoyment of it, how inevitably, but how purely, it yields
itself up to the sudden curve! It does not embrace this curve with
a sensuous sweep, nor does it, like Sappho, throw itself with quick
passion into the tide. It enters with maidenly and dignified reserve
into its new Life; and then how is this new Life spent? As you glance at
it, it seems almost ascetic, and reminds you of the rigid fatalism of
Egypt. Its grace is almost strangled, as those other serpents were in
the grasp of the child Hercules. But if you watch it attentively, you
will find it ever changing, though with subtilest refinement, ever
human, and true to the great laws of emotion. There is no straight
line here,--no Death in Life,--but the severity and composure of
intellectual meditation,--meditation, moving with serious pleasure
along the grooves of happy change,--

"As all the motions of its
Were governed by a strain
Of music, audible to it alone!"

As the eye is cheated out of its rectitude, following this grave
delight, and seems to dilate and grow dreamy in the cool shade of
imaginative cloisters and groves, the wanton joyousness of Life, with
its long waving lily-stems and the luscious pending of vines, comes with
dim recollections into the mind, but modified by a certain habitual
chastity of thought. Follow the line still farther, and you will find
it grateful to the sight, neither fatiguing with excess of monotony nor
cloying the appetite with change. And when the round hour is full and
the end comes, this end is met by a Fate, which does not clip with
the shears of Atropos and leave an aching void, but fulfils itself in
gentleness and peace. The line bends quietly and unconsciously towards
the beautiful consummation, and then dies, because its work is done.

This is the way the Greeks