ch called "Idolatry." It is one of the half-dozen referred to as
having been found amongst his papers after his death.

His grand-aunt apparently, though a bigoted Roman Catholic convert, with
a want of logic that was characteristic, had never given him any
religious instruction. His boyish yearning for beauty found no spiritual
sustenance except from an old Greek icon of the Virgin Mary, or ugly,
stiff drawings of saints and patriarchs. One memorable day, however,
exploring in the library, he found several great folio books, containing
figures of gods and of demigods, athletes and heroes, nereids and all
the charming monsters, half man, half animal, of Greek mythology. Figure
after figure dazzled and bewitched him, but filled him with fear.
Something invisible seemed thrilling out of the pictured pages; he
remembered stories of magic that informed the work of the pagan
statuaries; then a conviction, or rather intuition, came to him that the
gods had been belied because they were beautiful. The mediaeval creed
seemed to him at that moment the very religion of ugliness and hate.

The delight he felt in these volumes was soon made a source of sorrow;
the boy's reading was subjected to severe examination. One day the books
disappeared. After many weeks they were returned to their former places,
but all unmercifully revised. The religious tutelage under which he was
placed had been offended by the nakedness of the gods, parts of many
figures had been erased with a penknife, and, in some cases, drawers had
been put on the gods--large, baggy bathing drawers, woven with cross
strokes of a quill pen, so designed as to conceal all curves of
beauty.... The barbarism, however, he says, proved of some educational
value. It furnished him with many problems of restoration; for he tried
persistently to reproduce in pencil drawing the obliterated lines. By
this patient study Greek artistic ideas were made familiar....

After the world of Hellenic beauty had thus been revealed, all things
began to glow with unaccustomed light.... In the sunshine, in the green
of the fields, in the blue of the sky, he found a gladness before
unknown. Within himself new thoughts, new imaginings, dim longings for
he knew not what, were quickening and thrilling. He looked for beauty
and found it in attitudes and motions, in the poise of plants and trees,
in long white clouds, in the faint blue lines of the far-off hills. At
moments the simple pleasures of