are simply the result of the blindness of the Soul;--its
temporary blindness, not its essential glory. But the true
business of Poetry never changes; it is to open paths into the
inner, the beautiful, the spiritual world.

Just when things were coming to this pass H. P. Blavatsky went to
England; and though she did not touch the field of creative
literature herself, brought back as you know a gleam of light and
beauty into poetry that may yet broaden out and redeem it. She
was born when the century was thirty-one years old; and,
curiously enough, there was a man born in Attica about 469, or
when _his_ century was thirty-one years old, who, though he did
not himself touch the field of literature, was the cause why that
light rose to shine in it which has shone most brilliantly since
all down the ages; that light which we could not afford to
exchange even for the light of Aeschylus. If one of the two were
about to be taken from us, and we had our choice which it should
be, we should have to cry, _Take Aeschylus, but leave us this!_
--Ay, and take all other Greek literature into the bargain!--But
to return to the man born in 469.

He was the son of humble people; his father was a stone-cutter
in a small way of business; his mother a midwife. He himself
began life as a sculptor,--a calling, in its lower reaches, not
so far above that of his father. A group of the Graces carved by
him was still to be seen on the road to the Acropolis two hundred
years after; and they did not adorn Athens with mean work, one
may guess; the Athens of Pericles and Pheidias. But, successful
or not, he seems soon to have given it up. Of his youth we know
very little. Spintharus, one of the few that knew him then and