n_--and so on until time itself is transcended.

[Illustration 23]

In the same way, in nature, a thing is echoed and repeated throughout
its parts. Each leaf on a tree is itself a tree in miniature, each
blossom a modified leaf; every vertebrate animal is a complicated
system of spines; the ripple is the wave of a larger wave, and that
larger wave is a part of the ebbing and flowing tide. In music this
law is illustrated in the return of the tonic to itself in the octave,
and its partial return in the dominant; also in a more extended sense
in the repetition of a major theme in the minor, or in the treble and
again in the bass, with modifications perhaps of time and key. In
the art of painting the law is exemplified in the repetition with
variation of certain colors and combinations of lines in different
parts of the same picture, so disposed as to lead the eye to some
focal point. Every painter knows that any important color in his
picture must be echoed, as it were, in different places, for harmony
of the whole.

[Illustration 24]

In the drama the repetition of a speech or of an entire scene, but
under circumstances which give it a different meaning, is often most
effective, as when Gratiano, in the trial scene of _The Merchant
of Venice_ taunts Shylock with his own words, "A Daniel come to
judgment!" or, as when in one of the later scenes of _As You Like It_
an earlier scene is repeated, but with Rosalind speaking in her proper
person and no longer as the boy Ganymede.

These recurrences, these inner consonances, these repetitions with
variations are common in architecture also. The channeled triglyphs of
a Greek Doric frieze echo the fluted columns below (Illustration 24).
The balustrade which crowns a colonnade is a repetition, in some sort,
of the colonnade itself. The modillions of a Corinthian cornice are
but elaborated and embellished dentils. Each pinnacle of a Gothic
cathedral is a little tower with its spire. As Ruskin has pointed out,
the great vault of the cathedral nave, together with the pointed roof
above it, is repeated in the entrance arch with its gable, and the
same two elements appear in every statue-enshrining niche of the
doorway. In classic architecture, as has been shown, instead of the
arch and gable, the column and entablature everywhere recur under
different forms. The minor domes which flank the great dome of the
cathedral of Florence enhance and reinforce the latter, and prepare
t