an eternity and inexhaustible
power in those huge carvings; the sculptors were bent on one
end:--to make the stone speak out of superhuman heights, and
proclaim the majesty of the Everlasting.--In the Babylonian
sculptures we see the kings going into battle weaponless, but
calm and invincible; and behind and standing over, to protect and
fight for them, terrific monsters, armed and tiger-headed or
leopard-headed--the 'divinity that hedges a king' treated
symbolically. As always in those days, though many veils might
hide from the consciousness of Assyria and later Babylon the
beautiful reality of the Soul of Things, the endeavor, the
_raison d'etre,_ of Art was to declare the Might, Power, Majesty,
and dominion which abide beyond our common levels of thought.

Now then: that great Memnon's head comes from behind the horizon
of time and the sunset of the Mysteries; and in it we sample the
kind of consciousness produced by the Teaching of the Mysteries.
Go back step by step, from Shakespeare's

"Glamis hath murdered Sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep
no more.";

to Dante's

"The love that moves the Sun and the other Stars";

to Talesin's

"My original country is the Region of the Summer Stars";

to Aeschylus's bronze-throat eagle-bark at blood;--and the next
step you come to beyond (in the West)--the next expression of the
Human Soul--marked with the same kind of feeling--the same
spiritual and divine hauteur--is, for lack of literary remains,
this Egyptian sculpture. The Grand Manner, the majestic note of
Esotericism, the highest in art and literature, is a stream
flowing down to us from the Sacred Mysteries of Antiquity.

It is curious that a crude primtivism in sculpture--and in
architecture too--should have gone on side by side, in Greece,
during the seventh and sixth centuries B. C., with the very
finished art of the Lyricists from Sappho to Pindar; but
apparently it did. (They had wooden temples, painted in bright
reds and greens; I understand without pillared facades.) I
imagine the explanation to be something like this: You are to
think of an influx of the Human Spirit, proceeding downward from
its own realms towards these, until it strikes some civilization
--the Greek, in this case. Now poetry, because its medium is less
material, lies much nearer than do the plastic arts to the Spirit
on its descending course; and therefore receives the impulse of
its descent muc