You remember Pliny's account of the visit of Apelles to the great
painter Protogenes, at Rhodes;--how, not finding him at home, Apelles
inscribed a line upon a board, assuring the slave that this line would
signify to the master who had been to see him. Whatever the line was,
Protogenes, we hear, recognized in it the hand of the greatest limner of
Greece. It was the signature of that Ideal, known to the antique
world by its wider developments in the famous pictures of the Venus
Anadyomene, and Alexander with the Thunderbolt, hung in the temple of
Diana at Ephesus.

The gravity with which this apparently trifling anecdote is given us
from antiquity evidently proves that it was one of the household tales
of old Greece. It did not seem absurd in those times, when Art was
recognized as a great Unity, an elaborate system of infinite language
founded on the simplest elements of Life, and in its grandest and widest
flowings bearing ever in its bosom, like a great river, the memory
of the little weeping Naiad far up among the mountains with her
"impoverished urn." And so every great national Art, growing up
naturally out of the necessities of an earnest people, expressing the
grand motives of their Life, as that of the Greeks and the Egyptians and
the mediaeval nations of Europe, is founded on the simplest laws. So
long as these laws are obeyed in simplicity and Love, Art is good
and true; so long as it remembers the purity and earnestness of its
childhood, the strength that is ordained out of the mouth of babes is
present in all its expressions; but when it spreads itself abroad in the
fens and marshes of humanity, it has lost the purity of its aim, the
singleness and unity of its action,--it becomes stagnant, and sleeps in
the Death of Idleness.

Therefore I believe in the expressiveness of single lines as symbols of