150 BIRDS AND POETS 
of the structure nearly complete. Not so with the 
Greek: he did not seek the beautiful; he was 
beauty; his building had no ornament, it was all 
structure; in its beauty was the flower of necessity, 
the charm of inborn fitness and proportion. In 
other words, “‘his art was structure refined into beau- 
tiful forms, not beautiful forms superimposed upon 
structure,” as with the Roman. And it is in Greek 
mythology, is it not, that Beauty is represented as 
riding upon the back of a lion? as she assuredly 
always does in their poetry and art,—rides upon 
power, or terror, or savage fate; not only rides upon, 
but is wedded and incorporated with; hence the 
athletic desire and refreshment her coming imparts. 
This is the invariable order of nature. Beauty 
without a rank material basis enfeebles. The world 
is not thus made; man is not thus begotten and 
nourished. 
It comes to me there is something implied or 
understood when we look upon a beautiful object, 
that has quite as much to do with the impression 
made upon the mind as anything in the object itself; 
perhaps more. ‘There is somehow an immense and 
undefined background of vast and unconscionable 
energy, as of earthquakes, and ocean storms, and 
cleft mountains, across which things of beauty play, 
and to which they constantly defer; and when this 
background is wanting, as it is in much current 
poetry, beauty sickens and dies, or at most has only 
a feeble existence. 
Nature does nothing merely for beauty; beauty 
