Their white figures came crowding into
my mind.
The learning of the philosophers of Greece; the "plain living and high
thinking" they taught; the unspeakable purity of her art; the
ineffable manner in which her masters reproduced the idea of the
stern, cold pride of aloofness in these sublime types of perfect men,
wrung my heart with a sense of personal loss. I can imagine that
Pygmalion felt about Galatea as I felt that first hour in the
Acropolis. I can imagine that a woman who had loved with the passion
of her life a man of matchless integrity, of superb pride, of lofty
ideals, and who had lost that love irretrievably through a fault of
her own, whose gravity she first saw through his eyes when it was too
late, might have felt as I felt in that hour. All the agony of a
hopeless love for an art which never can return; all the sense of
personal loss for the purity which I was completely realizing for the
first time when it was too late; all the intense longing to have the
dead past live again, that I might prove myself more worthy of it,
assailed me with as mighty a force as ever the human heart could
experience and still continue to beat.
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