remodels all that it receives from the external world, vivifying and
characterizing all with itself, and thus bringing forth into light the
more beautiful but latent creations of nature. The "activity and
restlessness" of the mind seek satisfaction from curiosity, novelty,
variety, and contrast. Curiosity, "the anxiety for the future, the
keeping the event suspended," he considers to be exclusively the
province of poetry, and that "the painter's art is more confined, and
has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this
power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally
engaged. What is done by painting must be done at one blow; curiosity
has received at once all the satisfaction it can have." Novelty,
variety, and contrast, however, belong to the painter. That poetry has
this power, and operates by more extensively raising our curiosity,
cannot be denied; but we hesitate in altogether excluding this power
from painting. A momentary action may be so represented, as to elicit a
desire for, and even an intimation of its event. It is true _that_
curiosity cannot be satisfied, but it works and conjectures; and we
suspect there is something of it in most good pictures. Take such a
subject as the "Judgment of Solomon:" is not the "event suspended," and
a breathless anxiety portrayed in the characters, and freely
acknowledged by the sympathy of the spectator? Is there no mark of this
"curiosity" in the "Cartoon of Pisa?" The trumpet has sounded, the
soldiers are some half-dressed, some out of the water, others bathing;
one is anxiously looking for the rising of his companion, who has just
plunged in, and we see but his hands above the water; the very range of
rocks, behind which the danger is shown to come, tends to excite our
curiosity; we form conjectures of the enemy, their number, nearness of
approach, and from among the manly warriors before us form episodes of
heroism in the great intimated epic: and have we not seen pictures by
Rembrandt, where "curiosity" delights to search unsatisfied and