livelier and clearer perceptions: whereas our eyes are dimmed by poring over the records of what others have seen and thought; and the impressions we thus obtain are much less vivid and true.

Added to all this, their anthropomorphic Religion, which sprang in the first instance out of these very tendencies of the Greek mind, reacted powerfully upon them, as the free exercise of every faculty is wont to do, and exerted a great influence in keeping the Greeks within the sphere which Nature seemed to assign to them, by preventing their thinking or desiring to venture out of that sphere, and by teaching them to find contentment and every enjoyment they could imagine within it. For it was by abiding within it that they were as gods. The feeling exprest in the speech of Achilles in Hades was one in which the whole people partook :

βουλοίμην κ ̓ ἐπάρουρος ἐὼν θητευέμεν ἄλλῳ,

ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθιμένοισιν ἀνάσσειν. Through the combined operation of these causes, the Greeks acquired a clearness of vision for all the workings of life, and all the manifestations of beauty, far beyond that of any other people. Whatever they saw, they saw thoroughly, almost palpably, with a sharpness incomprehensible in our land of books and mists.

To mention a couple of instances: the anatomy of the older Greek statues is so perfect, that Mr. Haydon,— whose scattered dissertations on questions of art, rich as they often are in genius and thought, well deserve to be collected and preserved from a newspaper grave,—in his remarks on the Elgin marbles, pledged himself that, if any one were to break off a toe from one of those marbles, he would prove 66 the great consequences of vitality, as it acts externally, to exist in that toe." Yet it is very doubtful whether the Greeks ever anatomized human bodies, at all events they knew hardly anything of anatomy scientifically, from an examination of the internal structure,-before the Alexandrian age. Now, even with the help of our scientific knowledge, it is a rarity in

modern art to find figures, of which the anatomy is not in some respects faulty; at least where the body is not either almost entirely concealed by drapery, or cased, like the yolk of an egg, in the soft albumen of a pseudo-ideal. When it is otherwise, as in the works of Michael Angelo and Annibal Caracci, we too often see studies, rather than works of art, and muscular contortions and convolutions, instead of the gentle play and flow of life. Mr. Haydon indeed contends that the Greek sculptors must have been good anatomists: but all historical evidence is against this supposition. The truth is, that, as such wonderful stories are told of the keen eyes which the wild Indians have for all manner of tracks in their forests, so the Greeks had a clear and keen-sightedness in another direction, which to us, all whose perceptions are mixt up with ⚫ such a bundle of multifarious notions, and who see so many things in everything, beside what we really do see, appears quite inconceivable. They studied life, not as we do, in death, but in life; and that not in the stiff, crampt, inanimate life of a model, but in the fresh, buoyant, energetic life, which was called forth in the gymnasia.

Another striking example of the accuracy of the Greek eye is supplied by a remark of Spurzheim's, that the heads of all the old Greek statues are in perfect accordance with his system, and betoken the very intellectual and moral qualities which the character was meant to be endowed with; although in few modern statues or busts is any correspondence discoverable between the character and the shape of the head. For groundless and erroneous as may be the psychological, or, as the authors themselves term them, the phrenological views, which have lately been set forth as the scientific anatomy of the humanmind, it can hardly be questioned that there is a great deal of truth in what Coleridge (Friend iii. p. 62) calls the indicative or gnomonic part of the scheme, or that Gall was an acute and accurate observer of those conformations of the skull, which are the ordinary accompaniments, if not the infallible signs, of the various intellectual powers.

But in these very observations he had been anticipated above two thousand years ago by the unerring eyes of the Greek sculptors.

In like manner do the Greeks seem, by a kind of intuition, to have at once caught the true principles of proportion and harmony and grace and beauty in all things,— in the human figure, in architecture, in all mechanical works, in style, in the various forms and modes of composition. These principles, which they discerned from the first, and which other nations have hardly known anything of, except as primarily derivative from them, they exemplified in that wonderful series of masterpieces, from Homer down to Plato and Aristotle and Demosthenes; a series of which we only see the fragments, but the mere fragments of which the rest of the world cannot match. Rome may have more regal majesty; modern Europe may be superior in wisdom, especially in that wisdom of which the owl may serve as the emblem; but in the contest of Beauty no one could hesitate; the apple must be awarded to Greece.

This is what I meant by speaking of the ἄσπετος αἰθηρ of Greek literature. The Greeks saw what they saw thoroughly. Their eyes were piercing; and they knew how to use them, and to trust them. In modern literature on the other hand the pervading feeling is, that we see through a glass darkly. While with the Greeks the unseen world was the world of shadows, in the great works of modern times there is a more or less conscious feeling that the outward world of the eye is the world of shadows, that the tangled web of life is to be swept away, and that the invisible world is the only abode of true, living realities. How strongly is this illustrated by the contrast between the two great works which stand at the head of ancient and of Christian literature, the Homeric poems, and the Divina Commedia! While the former teem with life, like a morning in spring, and everything in them, as on such a morning, has its life raised to the highest pitch, Dante's wanderings are all through the regions beyond the grave

He begins with overleaping death, and leaving it behind him; and to his imagination the secret things of the next world, and its inhabitants, seem to be more distinctly and vividly present than the persons and things around him. Nor was Milton's home on earth. And though Shakspeare's was, it was not on an earth lying quietly beneath the clear, blue sky. How he drives the clouds over it! how he flashes across it! Ever and anon indeed he sweeps the clouds away, and shines down brightly upon it, but only for a few moments together. Thus too has it been with all those in modern times whose minds have been so far opened as to see and feel the mystery of life. They have not shrunk from that mystery in reverent awe like the Greeks, nor planted a beautiful, impenetrable grove around the temple of the Furies. While the Greeks, as I said just now, could not dream of anatomizing life, we have anatomized everything: and whereas all their works are of the day, a large portion of ours might fitly be designated by the title of Night Thoughts. As to the frivolous triflers, who take things as they are, and skip about and sip the surface, they are no more to be reckoned into account in estimating the character of an age, than a man would take the flies and moths into account in drawing up an inventory of his chattels.

Perhaps however the reason why modern literature has not had more of this serenity and brightness, is that it has so seldom been animated by the true spirit of Christianity in any high degree. A little knowledge will merely unsettle a man's prejudices, without giving him anything better in their stead: and Christianity, intellectually as well as morally, unless it be indeed embraced with a longing and believing heart, serves only to make our darkness visible. The burning and shining lights of Christianity have rather been content to shine in the vallies: those on the hills have mostly been lights of this world, and therefore flaring and smoking. For individual Christians there are, individual Christians, I believe, there have been in all ages, whose spirits do indeed dwell in the

midst of an ἄσπετος αιθήρ. Nay, as Coleridge once said to me, "that in Italy the sky is so clear, you seem to see beyond the moon," so are there those who seem to look beyond and through the heavens, into the very heaven of heavens.

U.

Thirlwall, in his History,-in which the Greeks have at length been called out of their graves by a mind combining their own clearness and grace with the wealth and power of modern learning and thought, and at whose call, as at that of a kindred spirit, they have therefore readily come forth,—remarks, that Greece “is distinguisht among European countries by the same character which disguishes Europe itself from the other continents,—the great range of its coast, compared with the extent of its surface." The same fact, and its importance, are noticed by Frederic Schlegel in his second Lecture on the Philosophy of History. Nothing could be more favourable as a condition, not only of political and commercial, but also of intellectual greatness. Indeed this might be added to the long list of grounds for the truth of the Pindaric saying, ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, and would suggest itself in an ode addrest to Hiero far more naturally and appropriately than the superiority of wine and water to wine; a superiority which it may be a mark of barbarism to deny, but which few Englishmen would acknowledge.

A similar extent of coast was also one of the great advantages of Italy, and is now one of the greatest in the local condition of England. Goethe, who above all men had the talent of expressing profound and farstretching thoughts in the simplest words, and whose style has more of light in it, with less of lightning, than any other writer's since Plato, has thrown out a suggestion in one of his reviews (vol. xlv. p. 227), that "perhaps it is the sight of the sea from youth upward, that gives English and Spanish poets such an advantage over those of inland countries." He spoke on this point from his own feelings: for he himself never saw the sea, till he went to