[13] In the Greek, 'ambrosial.' Recollect always that ambrosia, as food of gods, is the continual restorer of strength; that all food is ambrosial when it nourishes, and that the night is called 'ambrosial' because it restores strength to the soul through its peace, as, in the 23d Psalm, the stillness of waters.
[14] I have italicized this final promise of blessedness, given by the noble Spirit of Workmanship. Compare Carlyle's fifth Latter-day Pamphlet, throughout; but especially pp. 12-14, in the first edition.
[15] "Falsely represented," would be the better expression. In the cast of the tomb of Queen Eleanor, for a single instance, the Gothic foliage, of which one essential virtue is its change over every shield, is represented by a repetition of casts from one mold, of which the design itself is entirely conjectural.
66. The principal object of the preceding Lecture, (and I choose rather to incur your blame for tediousness in repeating, than for obscurity in defining it,) was to enforce the distinction between the ignoble and false phase of Idolatry, which consists in the attribution of a spiritual power to a material thing; and the noble and truth-seeking phase of it, to which I shall in these Lectures[16] give the general term of Imagination;--that is to say, the invention of material symbols which may lead us to contemplate the character and nature of gods, spirits, or abstract virtues and powers, without in the least implying the actual presence of such Beings among us, or even their possession, in reality, of the forms we attribute to them.
67. For instance, in the ordinarily received Greek type of Athena, on vases of the Phidian time, (sufficiently represented in the following wood-cut,) no Greek would have supposed the vase on which this was painted to be itself Athena, nor to contain Athena inside of it, as the Arabian fisherman's casket contained the genie; neither did he think that this rude black painting, done at speed as the potter's fancy urged his hand, represented anything like the form or aspect of the goddess herself. Nor would he have thought so, even had the image been ever so beautifully wrought. The goddess might, indeed, visibly appear under the form of an armed virgin, as she might under that of a hawk or a swallow, when it pleased her to give such manifestation of her presence; but it did not, therefore, follow that she was constantly invested with any of these forms, or that the best which human skill could, even by her own aid, picture of her, was, indeed, a likeness of her. The real use, at all events, of this rude image, was only to signify to the eye and heart the facts of the existence, in some manner, of a Spirit of wisdom, perfect in gentleness, irresistible in anger; having also physical dominion over the air which is the life and breath of all creatures, and clothed, to human eyes, with ægis of fiery cloud, and raiment of falling dew.
