to make your marble quite fluidic, and flow into innumerable
graceful forms; you may be past master of every intricacy,
multiplying your skill to the power of n;--but you will still in
reality have made no progress beyond that unknown carver who
shaped his syenite, or his basalt, into the "peace which passeth
understanding"--"the eternity which baffles and confounds all
faculty of computation."

If we turn to Assyria, we find much the same thing. This was a
people far less spiritual than the Egyptians: a cruel, splendid,
luxurious civilization deifying material power. But you cannot
look at the great Winged Bulls without knowing that there, too,
the motive was religious. There is an eternity and inexhaustible
power in those huge carvings; the sculptors were bent on one
end:--to make the stone speak out of superhuman heights, and
proclaim the majesty of the Everlasting.--In the Babylonian
sculptures we see the kings going into battle weaponless, but
calm and invincible; and behind and standing over, to protect and
fight for them, terrific monsters, armed and tiger-headed or
leopard-headed--the 'divinity that hedges a king' treated
symbolically. As always in those days, though many veils might
hide from the consciousness of Assyria and later Babylon the
beautiful reality of the Soul of Things, the endeavor, the
_raison d'etre,_ of Art was to declare the Might, Power, Majesty,
and dominion which abide beyond our common levels of thought.

Now then: that great Memnon's head comes from behind the horizon
of time and the sunset of the Mysteries; and in it we sample the
kind of consciousness produced by the Teaching of the Mysteries.
Go back step by step, from Shakespeare's