death,--lest we too, as smit with the basilisk, be turned into
monumental stone, and all the dear grace and movement of life be lost
forever!

"Solid-set,
And moulded in colossal calm,"

all the lines of this lost Art thus recall the sentiment of endless
repose, and even the necessary curves of its mouldings are dead with
straightness. The Love which produced these lines was not the passionate
Love which we understand and feel; they were not the result of a
sensuous impulse; but the Egyptian artist seemed ever to be standing
alone in the midst of a trackless and limitless desert,--around him
earth and sky meeting with no kiss of affection, no palpitating embrace
of mutual sympathy; he felt himself encircled by a calm and pitiless
Destiny, the cold expression of a Fate from which he could not flee, and
in himself the centre and soul of it all. Oppressed thus with a vast
sense of spiritual loneliness, when he uttered the inspirations of Art,
the memories of playful palms and floating lilies and fluttering wings,
though they came warm to the Love of his heart, were attuned in the
outward expression to the deep, solemn, prevailing monotone of his
humanity. His Love for the Lotus and the Ibis, more profound than the
passion of the senses, dwelt serene in the bottom of his soul, and
thence came forth transfigured and dedicated to the very noblest uses of
Life. And this is the Art of Egypt.

But among all the old nations which have perished with their gods,
Greece appeals to our closest sympathies. She looks upon us with
the smile of childhood, free, contented, and happy, with no ascetic
self-denials to check her wild-flower growth, no stern religion to bind