convinced, perhaps unconsciously,
of the grandeur and reality of the Soul. Having watched
Eternity on that face many times, I rejoiced to find this
description of it in De Quincey;--if he was not speaking of this,
what he says fits it admirably:

"That other object which for four and twenty years in the British
Museum struck me as simply the sublimest sight which in this
sight-seeing world I had seen. It was the memnon's head, then
recently brought from Egypt. I looked at it, as the reader must
suppose in order to understand the depth which I have here
ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a symbolic
head; and what it symbolized to me were: (1) the peace which
passeth understanding. (2) The eternity which baffles and
confounds all faculty of computation--the eternity which had
been, the eternity which was to be. (3) The diffusive love, not
such as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality,
not such as sinks and swells by undulations of time, but a
procession, an emanation, from some mystery of endless dawn. You
durst not call it a smile that radiated from those lips; the
radiation was too awful to clothe itself in adumbrations of
memorials of flesh."

Art can never reach higher than that,--if we think of it as a
factor in human evolution. What else you may say of Egyptian
sculpture is of minor importance: as, that it was stiff,
conventional, or what not; that each figure is portrayed sitting
bolt upright, hands out straight, palms down, upon the knees, and
eyes gazing into eternity. Ultimately we must regard Art in this
Egyptian way: as a thing sacred, a servant of the Mysteries; the
revealer of the Soul and the other side of the sky. You may
have enormous facility in playing with your medium; may be able
to make your marble quite fluidic, and flow into innumerable
graceful forms; you may be past master of every intricacy,
multiplying your skill to the power of n;--but you will still in
reality have made no progress beyond that unknown carver who
shaped his syenite, or his basalt, into the "peace which passeth
understanding"--"the eternity which baffles and confounds all
faculty of computation."

If we turn to Assyria, we find much the same thing. This was a
people far less spiritual than the Egyptians: a cruel, splendid,
luxurious civilization deifying material power. But you cannot
look at the great Winged Bulls without knowing that there, too,
the motive was religious. There is