upon them by which they become expressive to the spirit, the
better you will like this peculiar quality of colour; and you will
find that quaint design of Botticelli's a more direct inlet into the
Greek temper than the works of the Greeks themselves even of
the finest period. Of the Greeks as they really were, of their
difference from ourselves, of the aspects of their outward life, we
know far more than Botticelli, or his most learned
contemporaries; but for us long familiarity has taken off the edge
of the lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to the
Hellenic spirit. But in pictures like this of Botticelli's you have a
record of the first impression made [59] by it on minds
turned back towards it, in almost painful aspiration, from a world
in which it had been ignored so long; and in the passion, the
energy, the industry of realisation, with which Botticelli carries
out his intention, is the exact measure of the legitimate influence
over the human mind of the imaginative system of which this is
perhaps the central myth. The light is indeed cold--mere sunless
dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine;
and you can see the better for that quietness in the morning air
each long promontory, as it slopes down to the water's edge.
Men go forth to their labours until the evening; but she is awake
before them, and you might think that the sorrow in her face was
at the thought of the whole long day of love yet to come. An
emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across the grey
water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on which she sails,
the sea "showing his teeth," as it moves, in thin lines of foam,
and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in
outline, plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as
Botticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all this imagery
to be altogether pleasurable; and it was partly an incompleteness