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 [58] 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 mere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit