urrency which was
not moral. Aurora[117] forgot to ask youth for her lover, and though
Tithonus is immortal, he is old, Achilles[118] is not quite
invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis
held him. Siegfried,[119] in the Niebelungen, is not quite immortal,
for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon's
blood, and that spot which it covered is mortal. And so it must be.
There is a crack in everything God has made. It would seem, there is
always this vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares, even into
the wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted to make bold
holiday, and to shake itself free of the old laws,--this back-stroke,
this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is fatal; that in nature
nothing can be given, all things are sold.

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis,[120] who keeps watch in the
universe, and lets no offense go unchastised. The Furies,[121] they
said, are attendants on justice, and if the sun in heaven should
transgress his path, they would punish him. The poets related that
stone walls, and iron swords, and leathern thongs had an occult
sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that the belt which Ajax
gave Hector[122] dragged the Trojan hero over the field at the wheels
of the car of Achilles, and the sword which Hector gave Ajax was that
on whose point Ajax fell. They recorded, that when the Thasians[123]
erected a statue to Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of his
rivals went to it by night, and endeavored to throw it down by
repeated blows, until at last he moved it from its pedestal, and was
crushed to death beneath its fall.

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from thought
above the will of the writer. That is the best part of each writer,
which has nothing private in it;[124] that which he does not know,
that which flowed out of his constitution, and not from his too
active invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might
not easily find, but in the study of many, you would abstract as the
spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, but the work of man in that
early Hellenic[125] world, that I would know. The name and
circumstance of Phidias, however convenient for history, embarrass
when we come to the highest criticism. We are to see that which man
was tending to do in a given period, and was hindered, or, if you
will, modified in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, of
Dante,