le in your
standard series, Hermes Eriophoros. You will find his motion among
clouds represented precisely in this laboring, failing, half-kneeling
attitude of limb. These forms, toiling up through the rippled sands of
heaven, are--not horses;--they are clouds themselves, _like_ horses, but
only a little like. Look how their hoofs lose themselves, buried in the
ripples of cloud; it makes one think of the quicksands of Morecambe Bay.

And their tails--what extraordinary tufts of tails, ending in points!
Yes; but do you not see, nearly joining with them, what is not a horse
tail at all; but a flame of fire, kindled at Apollo's knee? All the rest
of the radiance about him shoots _from_ him. But this is rendered _up_
to him. As the fruits of the earth are in one of his hands, its fire is
in the other. And all the warmth, as well as all the light of it, are
his.

We had a little natural philosophy, gentlemen, as well as theology, in
Florence, once upon a time.

161. Natural philosophy, and also natural art, for in this the Greek
reanimate was a nobler creature than the Greek who had died. His art had
a wider force and warmer glow. I have told you that the first Greeks
were distinguished from the barbarians by their simple humanity; the
second Greeks--these Florentine Greeks reanimate--are human more
strongly, more deeply, leaping from the Byzantine death at the call of
Christ, "Loose him, and let him go." And there is upon them at once the
joy of resurrection, and the solemnity of the grave.

[Illustration: VI.

Fairness of the Sea and Air.

In VENICE and ATHENS.]

162. Of this resurrection of the Greek, and the form of the tomb he had
been buried in "those four days," I have to give you some account in the
last lecture. I will only to-day show you an illustration of it which
brings us back to our immediate question as to the reasons why Northern
art could not accept classicism. When, in the closing lecture of "Aratra
Pentelici,"[AO] I compared Florentine with Greek work, it was to point
out to you the eager passions of the first as opposed to the formal
legalism and proprieties of the other. Greek work, I told you, while
truthful, was also restrained, and never but under majesty of law; while
Gothic work was true, in the perfect law of Liberty or Franchise. And
now I give you in facsimile (Plate VI.) the two Aphrodites thus
compared--the Aphrodite Thalassia of the Tyrrhene seas, and the
Aphrodite Urania of the Gree