metal cooled into noble curves and took the impress of the body of
a god. With enamel or polished jewels he gave sight to the
sightless eyes. The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath his
graver. And when, in some dim frescoed fane, or pillared sunlit
portico, the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal, those who
passed by, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], became
conscious of a new influence that had come across their lives, and
dreamily, or with a sense of strange and quickening joy, went to
their homes or daily labour, or wandered, it may be, through the
city gates to that nymph-haunted meadow where young Phaedrus bathed
his feet, and, lying there on the soft grass, beneath the tall
wind--whispering planes and flowering agnus castus, began to think
of the wonder of beauty, and grew silent with unaccustomed awe. In
those days the artist was free. From the river valley he took the
fine clay in his fingers, and with a little tool of wood or bone,
fashioned it into forms so exquisite that the people gave them to
the dead as their playthings, and we find them still in the dusty
tombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra, with the faint gold and
the fading crimson still lingering about hair and lips and raiment.
On a wall of fresh plaster, stained with bright sandyx or mixed
with milk and saffron, he pictured one who trod with tired feet the
purple white-starred fields of asphodel, one 'in whose eyelids lay
the whole of the Trojan War,' Polyxena, the daughter of Priam; or
figured Odysseus, the wise and cunning, bound by tight cords to the
mast-step, that he might listen without hurt to the singing of the
Sirens, or wandering by the clear river of Acheron, where the
ghosts of fishes flitted over the pebbly bed; or showed the Persian
in trews and mitre flying before the Greek at Marathon, or the
galleys clashing their beaks of brass in the little Salaminian bay.
He drew with silver-point and charcoal upon parchment and prepared