hy life is forfeit here; but take it, thou!--
Take even two lives for this forfeit one;
And thy fair portress--wed her; honor God,
Love one another, and obey the king."

Thus far the legend; but of Rhotrude's smile,
Or of the lords' applause, as truly they
Would have applauded their first judgment too,
We nothing learn: yet still the story lives,
Shines like a light across those dark old days,
Wonderful glimpse of woman's wit and love,
And worthy to be chronicled with hers
Who to her lover dear threw down her hair,
When all the garden glanced with angry blades;
Or like a picture framed in battle-pikes
And bristling swords, it hangs before our view,--
The palace-court white with the fallen snow,
The good king leaning out into the night,
And Rhotrude bearing Eginard on her back.

GREEK LINES.

[Concluded.]

"As when a ship, by skilful steersman wrought
Nigh river's mouth or foreland, where the
wind
Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail,--
So varied he, and of his tortuous train
Curl'd many a wanton wreath in sight of
Eve
To lure her eye."

And Eve, alas! yielded to the blandishments of the wily serpent, as we
moderns, in our Art, have yielded to the licentious, specious life-curve
of Hogarth. When I say Art, I mean that spirit of Art which has made us
rather imitative than creative, has made us hold a too faithful mirror
up to Nature, and has been content to let the great Ideal remain
petrified in the marbles of Greece.

I have endeavored to show how this Ideal may be concentrated in a
certain abstract line, not only of sensuous, but of intellectual
Beauty,--a line which, while it is as wise and subtle as the serpent, is
as harmless and loving as the sacred dove of Venus. I have endeavored
to prove how this line, the gesture of Attic eloquence, expresses the
civilization of Pericles and Plato, of Euripides and Apelles. It is now
proposed briefly to relate how this line was lost, when the politeness
and philosophy, the literature and the Art of Greece were chained to the
triumphal cars of Roman conquerors,--and how it seems to have been found
again in our own day, after slumbering so long in ruined temples, broken
statues, and cinerary urns.

The scholar who studies the aesthetical anatomy of Greek Art has
a melancholy pleasure, like a surgeon, in watching its slow, but
inevitable atrophy under the incubus of Rome. The wise, but childli