of old built their Temple, with awe and religious fear, that they might
thus express by costly and imperishable monuments their sense of God's
majesty and beauty. The modern traveller who visits the churches and
convents of Florence, or the museums where are preserved the fading
remains of its early religious Art, if he be a person of any
sensibility, cannot fail to be affected with the intense gravity and
earnestness which pervade them. They seem less to be paintings for the
embellishment of life than eloquent picture-writing by which burning
religious souls sought to preach the truths of the invisible world to
the eye of the multitude. Through all the deficiencies of perspective,
coloring, and outline incident to the childhood and early youth of Art,
one feels the passionate purpose of some lofty soul to express ideas of
patience, self-sacrifice, adoration, and aspiration far transcending the
limits of mortal capability.

The angels and celestial beings of these grave old painters are as
different from the fat little pink Cupids or lovely laughing children of
Titian and Correggio as are the sermons of President Edwards from the
love-songs of Tom Moore. These old seers of the pencil give you grave,
radiant beings, strong as man, fine as woman, sweeping downward in lines
of floating undulation, and seeming by the ease with which they remain
poised in the air to feel none of that earthly attraction which draws
material bodies earthward. Whether they wear the morning star on their
forehead or bear the lily or the sword in their hand, there is still
that suggestion of mystery and power about them, that air of dignity and
repose, that speak the children of a nobler race than ours. One could
well believe such a being might pass in his serene poised majesty of
motion through the walls of a gross material dwelling without deranging
one graceful fold of his swaying robe or unclasping the hands folded
quietly on his bosom. Well has a modern master of art and style said of