246 WILD SCENES -AND SONG-BIKDS. 



Homeric Dreams, Praxitelian forms rose up with awful 

 frowns, men felt at last the prophecy that had been in them. 

 So out of the inspiration of the earliest Hebrew Poetry, the 

 solemn magnificence of old Italian Art came forth, embody- 

 ing its vaguely shadowed visions in an enduring real ! 



And thus in the youth of mankind it has mostly been, 

 that the Poet has suggested while the Artist created. But 

 then Art too was young young in models and in modes 

 and the power and freedom of the Artist trammelled by the 

 need of exhausting drudgery through crude methods. Now 

 Art has all its triumphant past upon which to build new tri- 

 umphs, and now the Artist may be free. Before he was a 

 slave, that might not feel the full exultings of a procreative 

 joy the bliss of the conception as well as the happy ecstasy 

 of birth but now he may ; now he may be the free-limbed, 

 joyous Poet and conquering Artist all in one ! 



But above all things else it is as the favored child of his 

 old Mother Earth that our Poet- Artist can be happy and 

 free. Ay, and when he is living ever near to her, it seems 

 that he is almost a god I for then there is none of all with 

 whom he is surrounded to be his equal in the strength and 

 power of wisdom he derives from her. She speaks to him 

 as a familiar theme, concerning those high mysteries of life 

 before which the Magii trembled. 



She makes bare to him herself, and shows him the wonder 

 and the majesty of his own being as it is amplified in hers. 

 How all things own a common nature ascending in grada- 

 tions up to him how he is sovereign unit and lives through 

 her and she through him, and how, on the mighty scroll of 

 her primeval story, his past is spread before him, reveal- 

 ing the process of his own elaboration in God's creative 

 thought. 



Here he reads, how that from huge shapes floundering 

 blindly through the mud of chaos, just warmed by the en- 

 gendering look of God, he came forth a vital embryo, to 

 ascend through many grades of form, each organized more 



