ground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange whiteness
of the ceiling. Her trouble is in the very caress of the mysterious
child, whose gaze is always far from her, and who has already that sweet
look of devotion which men have never been able altogether to love, and
which still makes the born saint an object almost of suspicion to his
earthly brethren. Once, indeed, he guides her hand to transcribe in a
book the words of her exaltation, the _Ave_ and the _Magnificat_, and
the _Gaude Maria_, and the young angels, glad to rouse her for a moment
from her dejection, are eager to hold the inkhorn and support the book;
but the pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold words have no
meaning for her, and her true children are those others, in the midst of
whom, in her rude home, the intolerable honour came to her, with that
look of wistful inquiry on their irregular faces which you see in
startled animals--gipsy children, such as those who, in Apennine
villages, still hold out their long brown arms to beg of you, but on
Sundays become _enfants du choeur_ with their thick black hair nicely
combed and fair white linen on their sunburnt throats.

What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into classical
subjects, its most complete expression being a picture in the Uffizi, of
Venus rising from the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of the middle
age, and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange
draperies powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit
of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless nude
studies of Ingres. At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a
quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you
have read of Florence in the Fifteenth Century; afterwards you may think
that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that the
colour is cadaverous, or at least cold. And yet the more you come to
understand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is no