Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/42

 In the last year of his life he traversed Italy and Sicily with continual delight, and was like one intoxicated with the beauty of that Athens of which he caught but a glimpse, of that Greece whose sun so quickly destroyed him.

All this knowledge, all these experiences he hoped to make use of as the lines and colours for the great picture of ancient Greece which he meditated, for the canvas upon which he meant to portray the Greek civilization for the benefit of the moderns, with all its indivisible unity of social and political life, of literary and artistic production. In striking him down in his forty-second year, death put an end to this project, and the great picture, which would have been, perhaps, one of the capital works of our century, was never executed. But the preparatory sketches of the master happily remain to us. While he was employed in collecting materials for the work which he meant to be his highest title to honour, he was not shut up in silence and meditation, as a less prolific spirit might have been. His facility of arrangement and utterance was prodigious; all that he learnt, all new discoveries that he made or thought he had made, he hastened to make public, either by direct addresses to the auditors who crowded round his chair at Gottingen, or by his pen to the readers of the numerous philosophical periodicals to which he contributed. Like a man who has travelled much and who loves to tell of what he has seen, he was ever ready to take the public into his confidence when he embarked upon a new study. This he generally did by means of papers full of facts and ideas, written sometimes in German, sometimes in Latin. In his later years he issued short articles upon archæology and the history of art, in sufficient number to form five substantial volumes. Besides this, he gave to the world learned editions of Varro, of Festus, of the Eumenides of Æschylus; or important monographs like his Geschichten hellenischer Stämme und Städte, including Orchomenos und die Minyer and Die Dorier, the most famous and most actively discussed of his works; and finally, Die Etrusker, a work which was suggested to him by one of the publications of the Berlin Academy. There was also Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, which has been fruitful for good even in its errors, and the Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, &c., which,