to that immortality which so many look to as the human goal lies in those forms of ornament—of embellishment over and above mere use—which man's genius has left to us in architecture, poetry, music, sculpture, and painting. Nothing that stops at utility has anything like the same value, for the revelation of the human spirit, as that which finds its setting in the Arts—the sculptures of Egypt and Greece, the Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals of France, England, Germany and Italy, the paintings of the Renaissance, the masterpieces of Bach and Beethoven, the poems and writings all down the ages of men comparatively poor in monetary wealth, but rich beyond the dreams of avarice in their power to communicate their own souls to things material and to leave them there, when their own bodies have turned to dust. In the embellishment they added to life they bestowed on the age in which they lived its most significant commentary. There you will find, as nowhere else, the meaning and the interpretation of the whole social order to which these forms were as flower and fruit. Ancient Greece is not represented to us to-day by its descendants in the flesh (as an expression of that life they have ceased to exist) but by those works of art and philosophy through which men—many now nameless—made permanent the vision of delight to which, in the brief life of the flesh, they had become heirs. The self-realisation of that age—all the best of it
