246 
WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 
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 ItaUan 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 W9^ 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-hmbed, 
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 1 — 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 majest}^ 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 
