proposed to himself to present [32] to his worshippers the image of
this Zeus of Dodona, who is in the trees and on the currents of the
air. Then, if he had been a really imaginative sculptor, working as
Pheidias worked, the very soul of those moving, sonorous creatures
would have passed through his hand, into the eyes and hair of the
image; as they can actually pass into the visible expression of those
who have drunk deeply of them; as we may notice, sometimes, in our
walks on mountain or shore.

Victory again--Nike--associated so often with Zeus--on the top of his
staff, on the foot of his throne, on the palm of his extended hand--
meant originally, mythologic science tells us, only the great victory
of the sky, the triumph of morning over darkness. But that physical
morning of her origin has its ministry to the later aesthetic sense
also. For if Nike, when she appears in company with the mortal, and
wholly fleshly hero, in whose chariot she stands to guide the horses,
or whom she crowns with her garland of parsley or bay, or whose names
she writes on a shield, is imaginatively conceived, it is because the
old skyey influences are still not quite suppressed in her clear-set
eyes, and the dew of the morning still clings to her wings and her
floating hair.

The office of the imagination, then, in Greek sculpture, in its
handling of divine persons, is thus to condense the impressions of
natural things into human form; to retain that early mystical sense
of water, or wind, or light, in the [33] moulding of eye and brow; to
arrest it, or rather, perhaps, to set it free, there, as human
expression. The body of man, indeed, was for the Greeks, still the
genuine work of Prometheus; its connexion with earth and air asserted
in many a legend, not shaded down, as with us, through innumerable