th the
eternal mind; and work is good and productive in proportion to
the intensity of this cooeperation. Why is it that we so prize a
fragment of Phidias, a few lines traced by Raphael? Because the minds
of those workers were, more than the minds of most others, in sympathy
with the Infinite mind. While at work their hands were more distinctly
guided by the Almighty hand; they felt and embodied more of the spirit
which makes, which is, life.

Here is a frame of canvas, a block of marble, a pile of stones, a
vocabulary. Of the canvas you make a screen, you build a dwelling with
the pile of stones, chisel a door-sill out of the block, with the
vocabulary you write an essay. And in each case you work well and
creatively, if your work be in harmony with God's laws, if your screen
be light, sightly, and protective, your dwelling healthful and
commodious, your sill lie solid and square, your essay be judicious
and sound. But if on the canvas you have a Christ's head by Leonardo,
out of the pile of stones a Strasburg Cathedral, from the block of
marble a Venus of Milo, with the vocabulary a tragedy of Hamlet, you
have works which are so creative that they tell on the mind with the
vivid, impressive, instructive, never-wearying delight of the
works of nature. The men who wrought them were strong to do so through
the vigor of their sympathy with what Plato calls the formative
principle of the universe, they thereby becoming themselves creators,
that is, poets. And we sacredly guard their creations among our best
treasures of human gift, because they are so spiritually alive that
whenever we put ourselves in relation with them they animate us, they
spiritualize our thoughts; and this they do because the minds whence
they issued were radiant centers of ideal power, that is, power to
conceive the beautiful.

But what is ideal power? the reader may ask. He might likewise ask,
What is moral power? And unless he has in his own mind some faculty of
moral estimation, no answer will help him. That which comes to us
through feeling cannot be intellectually defined, can only be
appreciated through feeling. By describing its effects and
accompaniments we approach to a knowledge of what it is. By means of a
foot-rule you can make clear to every member of a crowd what is the
height of the Apollo Belvedere, and the exact length of the statue's
face; and each one can for himself verify the accuracy of your
statement. But not with a like dis