A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c7.38

c7.38

monstrous. But when the knowledge of their meaning comes to one who feels the divine in all religions, then they will be found to make appeal to the higher aestheticism, to the sense of moral beauty, with a force never to be divined by minds knowing nothing of the Orient and its thought . . . as they multiply before research, they vary and change: less multiform, less complex, less elusive the moving of waters, than the visions of this Oriental faith . . . The stranger, peering into its deeps, finds himself, as in the tale of Undine, contemplating a flood in whose every surge rises and vanishes a face—weird or beautiful or terrible—a most ancient shoreless sea of forms incomprehensibly interchanging and intermingling, but symbolizing the protean magic of that infinite unknown that shapes and reshapes for ever all cosmic being.’