disappointments and indignations and humiliations, in strains that
make their great writings sound like one long, impassioned, rhythmic
wail through the bars of a dungeon. Gloomy, wrathful, and intense,
their utterances are grand and pathetic and sublime; but the beautiful
plays through them, and gilds their highest points as the white crests
do the billows of a black, tempestuous sea.

Save these two, no other nations of antiquity, except the Hindoos,
seem to have had more than a superficial susceptibility to the
beautiful. The Romans learnt the arts from the Greeks, whom they
imitated, at a wide distance, in poetry as well as in sculpture and
architecture. The remnants of art found in the valley of the Nile
prove the Egyptians to have had the germ without the vitality to
unfold it. In the literature of the Hindoos there are currents of pure
poetry and of biblical depth. In passing down from ancient to modern
times the Persians and the Arabians light the long way with
scintillations from the beautiful.

The ugly semi-barbarian darkness of the Middle Ages in Europe was
first broken by the light that shone from the spires of Gothic
cathedrals in the eleventh century. About the twelfth century the
German mind was further illuminated by that mysterious, visionary,
titanic, Teutonic epic, the Niebelungen Lied; and a little later
appeared the troubadours in the south of Europe and the minnesingers
(love-singers) in Germany. Next came Dante and Giotto in Italy, then
Chaucer in England; so that by the end of the fourteenth century,
poetry and the arts, the offspring of the beautiful,--and who can have
no other parentage,--had established themselves in the modern European
mind, and have since, with varying vigor of life, upheld themselves
among Christian nations. To these they are now confined. In the most