dead things into life. And now we will go into the Uffizi.

Mr. Ruskin, in his petulant-playful way, has touched upon the feeling of
amaze most people have who look for the first time at Botticelli's
_Judith_ tripping smoothly and lightly over the hill-country, her
steadfast maid dogging with intent patient eyes every step she takes.
You say it is flippant, affected, pedantic. For answer, I refer you to
the sage himself, who, from his point of view--that painting may fairly
deal with a chapter of history--is perfectly right. The prevailing
strain of the story is the strength of weakness--_ex dulci fortitudo_,
to invert the old enigma. "O God, O my God, hear me also, a widow. Break
down their stateliness by the hand of a woman!" It is the refrain that
runs through the whole history of Israel, that reasonable complacency of
a little people in their God-fraught destiny. And, withal, a streak of
savage spite: that the audacious oppressor shall be done scornfully to
death. There is the motive of Jael and Sisera too. So "she smote twice
upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him,
and tumbled his body down from the bed." Ho! what a fate for the
emissary of the Great King. Wherefore, once more, the jubilant paradox,
"The Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman!" That is it: the
amazing, thrilling antithesis insisted on over and over again by the old
Hebrew bard. "Her sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his mind
prisoner, and the fauchion passed through his neck." That is the
_leit-motif_: Sandro the poet knew it perfectly well and taught it to
the no small comfort of Mr. Ruskin and his men. Giuditta, dainty,
blue-eyed, a girl still and three years a widow, flits homeward through
a spring landscape of grey and green and the smile of a milky sky, being
herself the dominant of the chord, with her bough of slipt olive and her
jagged scimitar, with her pretty blue fal-lals smocked and puffed, and
her yellow curls floating over her shoulders. On her slim feet are the