sleeping girl who dreams of one she will not name; had he been a poet,
he would have written the stanzas of Tasso's "Erminia," the moonlight
talk of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," or Byron's portrait of
Haidee.

He loved the good as well as the beautiful, but he loved not virtue for
its holiness, he loved it for its beauty. He would have been aspiring
in imagination, although he was not ambitious by character. Had he
lived in those ancient republics where men attained their full
development through liberty, as the free, unfettered body develops
itself in pure air and open sunshine, he would have aspired to every
summit like Cæsar, he would have spoken as Demosthenes, and would have
died as Cato. But his inglorious and obscure destiny confined him,
against his will, in speculative inaction,--he had wings to spread, and
no surrounding air to bear them up. He died young, straining his gaze
into the future, and ardently surveying the space over which he was
never to travel.

Every one knows the youthful portrait of Raphael to which I have
alluded. It represents a youth of sixteen, whose face is somewhat paled
by the rays of a Roman sun, but on whose cheek still blooms the soft
down of childhood. A glancing ray of light seems to play on the velvet
of the cheek. He leans his elbow on a table; the arm is bent upwards to
support the head, which rests on the palm of the hand, and the
admirably modelled fingers are lightly imprinted on the cheek and chin;
the delicate mouth is thoughtful and melancholy; the nose is slender at
its rise, and slightly tinged with blue, as though the azure veins
shone through the fair transparency of the skin; the eyes are of that
dark heavenly hue which the Apennines wear at the approach of dawn, and
they gaze earnestly forward, but are slightly raised to heaven, as