Page:The Dramas of Aeschylus (Swanwick).djvu/55

Rh Truly it may be said of the Virgin Goddess that, like the golden dawn, which she is thought to impersonate, she brightens more and more, still heralding by her effulgent but imperfect light the advent of the perfect day. In following the history of the Virgin Goddess, it is interesting to remember that the disappearance of her colossal statue from the Parthenon in the fifth century was coincident with the hymn addressed to her by her passionate worshipper, the neo-Platonist, Proclus; thus at the last "she makes a swan-like end, fading in music," and vanishes from history, after commanding, for upwards of a thousand years, the love and veneration of her votaries.

In connection with the study of ancient poetry, as recording the religious life of humanity, it is interesting to consider the history of plastic art, which may be regarded as its sensible expression, and as manifesting, through the medium of ideal forms, the successive stages of its development. Thus if we revert to that phase of the religious life which is embodied in the earliest literary relics of the Aryan race, we shall recognize the impossibility of embodying in harmonious forms beings so impalpable as the deities apostrophized by the Vedic bards. In the poetry of those early times we discern the working of the untutored mind struggling to body forth, through the imagery of external nature, its religious yearnings and aspirations; embarrassed by the complexity of unintelligible phenomena, and destitute of any principle of selection, the imagination runs riot, blends together images the most