the spirit of Christianity from Titian's "Assumption." The effective
vitality of the religious conception can be traced only through the
efforts of trembling hands, and strange pleasures of untaught eyes; and
the beauty of the dream can no more be found in the first symbols by
which it is expressed, than a child's idea of fairy-land can be gathered
from its pencil scrawl, or a girl's love for her broken doll explained by
the defaced features. On the other hand, the Athena of Phidias was, in
very fact, not so much the deity, as the darling of the Athenian people.
Her magnificence represented their pride and fondness, more than their
piety; and the great artist, in lavishing upon her dignities which might
be ended abruptly by the pillage they provoked, resigned, apparently
without regret, the awe of her ancient memory; and (with only the
careless remonstrance of a workman too strong to be proud) even the
perfectness of his own art. Rejoicing in the protection of their
goddess, and in their own hour of glory, the people of Athena robed her,
at their will, with the preciousness of ivory and gems; forgot or denied
the darkness of the breastplate of judgment, and vainly bade its
unappeasable serpents relax their coils in gold.

97. It will take me many a day yet--if days, many or few, are given me--
to disentangle in anywise the proud and practised disguises of religious
creeds from the instinctive arts which, grotesquely and indecorously, yet
with sincerity, strove to embody them, or to relate. But I think the
reader, by help even of the imperfect indications already given to him,
will be able to follow, with a continually increasing security, the
vestiges of the Myth of Athena; and to reanimate its almost evanescent
shade, by connecting it with the now recognized facts of existent nature
which it, more or less dimly, reflected and foretold. I gather these
facts together in brief.