be light, sightly, and protective, your dwelling healthful and
commodious, your sill lie solid and square, your essay be judicious
and sound. But if on the canvas you have a Christ's head by Leonardo,
out of the pile of stones a Strasburg Cathedral, from the block of
marble a Venus of Milo, with the vocabulary a tragedy of Hamlet, you
have works which are so creative that they tell on the mind with the
vivid, impressive, instructive, never-wearying delight of the
works of nature. The men who wrought them were strong to do so through
the vigor of their sympathy with what Plato calls the formative
principle of the universe, they thereby becoming themselves creators,
that is, poets. And we sacredly guard their creations among our best
treasures of human gift, because they are so spiritually alive that
whenever we put ourselves in relation with them they animate us, they
spiritualize our thoughts; and this they do because the minds whence
they issued were radiant centers of ideal power, that is, power to
conceive the beautiful.

But what is ideal power? the reader may ask. He might likewise ask,
What is moral power? And unless he has in his own mind some faculty of
moral estimation, no answer will help him. That which comes to us
through feeling cannot be intellectually defined, can only be
appreciated through feeling. By describing its effects and
accompaniments we approach to a knowledge of what it is. By means of a
foot-rule you can make clear to every member of a crowd what is the
height of the Apollo Belvedere, and the exact length of the statue's
face; and each one can for himself verify the accuracy of your
statement. But not with a like distinctness and vivacity of assent can
you get the crowd to go along with you as to the Apollo's beauty.
Acknowledgment of the beautiful in art implies a degree of culture and
a native susceptibility not to be found in every accidental gathering.