at first, but learn how to look, and the folds themselves will become
transparent, and you shall see through them the death's shape, or the
divine one, making the tissue above it as a cloud of right, or as a
winding-sheet.

108. Then further, observe, I have said (and you will find it true, and
that to the uttermost) that, as all lovely art is rooted in virtue, so it
bares fruit of virtue, and is didactic in its own nature. It is often
didactic also in actually expressed thought, as Giotto's, Michael
Angelo's, Dürer's, and hundreds more; but that is not its special
function; it is didactic chiefly by being beautiful; but beautiful with
haunting thought, no less than with form, and full of myths that can be
read only with the heart.

For instance, at this moment there is open beside me as I write, a page
of Persian manuscript, wrought with wreathed azure and gold, and soft
green, and violet, and ruby and scarlet, into one field of pure
resplendence. It is wrought to delight the eyes only; and does delight
them; and the man who did it assuredly had eyes in his head; but not much
more. It is not didactic art, but its author was happy; and it will do
the good, and the harm, that mere pleasure can do. But, opposite me, is
an early Turner drawing of the lake of Geneva, taken about two miles from
Geneva, on the Lausanne road, with Mont Blanc in the distance. The old
city is seen lying beyond the waveless waters, veiled with a sweet misty
veil of Athena's weaving; a faint light of morning, peaceful exceedingly,
and almost colorless, shed from behind the Voirons, increases into soft
amber along the slope of the Salëve, and is just seen, and no more, on
the fair warm fields of its summit, between the folds of a white cloud
that rests upon the grass, but rises, high and tower-like, into the
zenith of dawn above.