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 to 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, among 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 Uffizii,
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