in their depths. Whole peoples are at this
moment ignorant that they live amid such wealth. As with them now, so
in the remote primitive times of our own race, before history was,
nature was almost speechless to man. The earth was a waste, or but a
wide hunting ground or pasturage; and human life a round of petty
animal circles, scarcely sweeping beyond the field of the senses;
until there gradually grew up the big-eyed Greek and the deep-souled
Hebrew. Then, through creative thought,--that is, thought quickened
and exalted by an inward thirst for the beautiful,--one little corner
of Europe became radiant, and the valley of Tempe and the wooded glens
of Parnassus shone for the first time on the vision of men; for their
eyes--opened from long sleep by inward stirring--were become as
mirrors, and gave back the light of nature:

"Auxiliar light
Came from their minds, which on the setting sun
Bestowed new splendor."[1]

[1] Wordsworth.

And man, heated by the throbs of his swelling heart, made gods after
his own image,--forms of such life and power and harmony that the
fragments of them, spared by time, are still guarded as faultless
models of manhood. And the vales and groves and streams were peopled
with beauteous shapes. And the high places were crowned with temples
which, in their majestic purity, look as though they had been posited
there from above by heavenly hands. And by the teemful might of
sculptors and painters and poets the dim past was made resurgent and
present in glorious transfiguration. And the moral law was grasped at
by far-reaching philosophies. In this affluence of genial activity so
much truth was embodied in so much beauty, that by the products of the
Greek mind even the newer, the deeper, the wiser Christian spirit is
still instructed, still exalted.

In Asia, too, a chosen people early made a revelation of the
beautiful. The Hebrews were introspective. At once ardent and
thoughtful, passionate and spiritual, their vigorous natures were
charged with fiery materials for inward conflicts. Out of the secret
chambers of troubled souls their poets and prophets sent forth cries
of despair and of exultation, of expostulation and self-reproach, that
ever find an echo in the conscience-smitten, sorrow-laden bosom of
man. The power and wisdom of God they saw as no other ancient people
had seen them. In the grandeurs and wonders of creation they could
behold the bei