of Athos new types of beauty were being slowly wrought out which
passed outward from land to land, transfiguring the face of the world
as they went, kindling new life wherever they fell, miraculously
transformed by the separate genius of every country from Norway to
India, creating in Italy the whole of the great medieval art that
stretches from Duccio and Giotto to Signorelli, and leaving to us
here, as our most precious inheritances, such mere blurred and broken
fragments of their glories as the cathedral churches of Salisbury and
Winchester.

It is only in the growth and life of that new world that the decay and
death of the old can be regarded with equanimity, or can in a certain
sense be historically justified: for Greek civilisation was and still
is so incomparable and so precious that its loss might otherwise fill
the mind with despair, and seem to be the last irony cast by fate
against the idea of human progress. But it is the law of all Nature,
from her highest works to her lowest, that life only comes by death;
"she replenishes one thing out of another," in the words of the Roman
poet, "and does not suffer anything to be begotten before she has been
recruited by the death of something else." To all things born she
comes one day with her imperious message: /materies opus est ut
crescant postera secla/.[2] With the infinite patience of one who has
inexhaustible time and imperishable material at her absolute command,
slowly, vacillatingly, not hesitating at any waste or any cruelty,
Nature works out some form till it approaches perfection; then finds
it flawed, finds it is not the thing she meant, and with the same
strong, unscrupulous and passionless action breaks it up and begins
anew. As in our own lives we sometimes feel that the slow progress of
years, the structure built up cell by cell through pain and patience
and weariness at lavish cost seems one day, when some great new force