xternal environment is seen in the garden, palace,
and city of the Phaeacians, which are built by the spirit for its
dwelling-place and reflect the spirit. The Greek world of Beauty is
born, and its course is foreshadowed; this ideal Homeric realm is
prophetic of what Greece is to become. The plastic arts and the
industrial arts are suggested, and to a degree are realized.

The artistic soul of Hellas is fully felt in Homer's Phaeacia. The
formative impulse is everywhere alive and at work; the instinctive need
of shaping and transforming nature and life is here in its first
budding, and will bloom into the greatest art-people of all time. Those
two supreme Fine Arts of mature Greece, Architecture and Sculpture, are
present in examples which foretell plainly Phidias and the Parthenon.

King Alcinous; thy fair palace has had fairer offspring,
Thou art ruling the world still by the beautiful form;
Out of thy mansion majestic was born in a song the Greek Temple,
Sentineled round with a choir--Titans columnar of stone,
Bearing forever their burden to hymns of a Parian measure,
Wearing out heaviest Fate to a Pindaric high strain.
Look! those boys of thy garden with tapers are moving to statues,
Seeming to walk into stone while they are bringing the light;
Hellas springs out of thy palace all sculptured with actions
heroic,
Even the God we discern turning to marble by faith.

Such is the originative, prophetic character of Phaeacia, which the
reader must take profoundly into his soul, if he would understand the
genetic history of Greek spirit. Verily the poet is the maker of
archetypes and reveals in his shapes all that his people are to become.

Thou, old Homer, wert the first builder in Greece, the first
carver,
Afterward she could but turn fancies of thine into stone;
Architects followed thee, building thy poem aloft into temples,
Sculptors followed thee too, thinking in marble thy line.

Nor must we forget the Industrial Arts here suggested--weaving,
ship-building, the working of metals; in general, there is hinted the
varied transformation of nature, which begets a civilized life.
Agriculture is present, also horticulture, which the garden of Alcinous
presupposes. Such, then, is the grand frame-work for the social order
as here portrayed.

But the chief art of the Homeric world has not yet been given, though
it is at work now