n and astounding birth. Unluckily nothing
remains--I speak on tenterhooks--of its grandest moment. Progress
in architecture seems to have begun in the reign of Pisistratus;
some time in the next sixty years or so the Soul first impressed
its likeness on carved stone. I once saw a picture--in a lantern
lecture in London--of a pre-Pheidian statue of Athene; dating,
I suppose, from the end of the sixth century B. C. She is
advancing with upraised arm to protect--someone or something. The
figure is, perhaps, stiff and conventional; and you have no doubt
it is the likeness of a Goddess. She is not merely a very fine
and dignified woman; she is a Goddess, with something of
Egyptian sublimity. The artist, if he had not attained perfect
mastery of the human form--if his medium was not quite plastic to
him--knew well what the Soul is like.--The Greek had no feeling,
as the Egyptian had, for the _mystery_ of the Gods; at his very
best (once he had begun to be artistic) he personalized them; he
tried to put into his representations of them, what the Egyptian
had tried to put into his representations of men; and in that
sense this Athene is, after all, only a woman;--but one in whom
the Soul is quite manifest. I have never been able to trace this
statue since; and my recollections are rather hazy. But it
stands, for me, holding up a torch in the inner recesses of
history. It was the time when Pythagoras was teaching; it was
that momentous time when (as hardly since) the doors of the
Spiritual were flung open, and the impulse of the six Great
Teachers was let loose on the world. Hithertoo Greek carvers had
been making images of the Gods, symbolic indeed--with wings,
thunderbolts and other appurtenances;--but trivially symbolic;
mere imitation of the symbolism, without the dignity or religious
feeling, of the Egyptians and Babylonians; as if their gods and
worship had been mere conventions, about which they had felt
nothing deep;--now, upon this urge from the God-world, a sense of
the grandeur of the within comes on them; they seek a means of
expressing it: throw off the old conventions; will carve the
Gods as men; do so, their aspiration leading them on to perfect
mastery: for a moment achieve Egyptian sublimity; but--have
personalized the Gods; and dear knows what that may lead
to presently.

The came Pheidias, born about 496. Nothing of his work remains
for us; the Elgin Marbles themselves, from the Parthenon, are
p