Among The Antiques Here, My Two Favorites Are Venus De Milon, Which I
Have Described To You, And The Diane Chasseresse:
This goddess is
represented by the side of a stag; and so completely is the marble
made alive, that one seems to perceive that a tread so airy would not
bend a flower.
Every side of the statue is almost equally graceful.
The small, proud head is thrown back with the freedom of a stag; there
is a gay, haughty self-reliance, an airy defiance, a rejoicing fulness
of health and immortal youth in the whole figure. You see before you
the whole Greek conception of an immortal - a creature full of
intellect, full of the sparkle and elixir of existence, in whom the
principle of life seems to be crystallized and concentrated with a
dazzling abundance; light, airy, incapable alike of love and of
sympathy; living for self, and self only. Alas for poor souls, who, in
the heavy anguish of life, had only such goddesses to go to! How far
in advance is even the idolatry of Christianity! how different the
idea of Mary from the Diana!
Yet, as I walked up and down among these remains of Greek art, I could
not but wonder at the spectacle of their civilization: no modern
development reproduces it, nor ever can or will. It is well to cherish
and make much of that ethereal past, as a specimen of one phase of
humanity, for it is past _forever_. Those isles of Greece, with
their gold and purple haze of light and shadow, their exquisite,
half-spiritual, half-bodily formation - islands where flesh and blood became
semi-spiritual, and where the sense of beauty was an existence - have
passed as a vision of glory, never to return.
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