rise to the word innate, quenching the sense of frivolity, which
unrestrained, disordered state of things oozes out somewhere, or is at
any rate felt "in the air" in Michael Angelo's works. Stevens's head
was wonderfully poised on his own "torso" to know and feel this with
such thrilling, vital, consistent certainty. You catch awhile his
lovely idea in the strong fragrant symmetry permeating his work. The
iron soul of the man implants his lines of strength far inside
the actual bounds of the visible crust, and the mind of the idea,
naturally expanding is caught at the salient "processes" in curves
and features, betokening nothing--that touches--but grace. I should
mention that there is one fact which describes minutely my veneration
for Stevens's work at its best, perhaps the fullest; whereby I mean
that inspection of his intellectual labour has always restored to me
the time so wisely occupied in regarding it, proving that there is
goodness, virtue, essence in it, past all fellowship with ephemeral
things. There is a true, not a laconic, logical, and prophetic
inference in it that is apropriately styled, "time"; the finest
embodiment of musical equipoise; felt to a "tick"; no faltering,
barbaric, or false quantities, but a sustained and equable, uniform
tone of chromatic measure, meted out as by a mind imbued by but
sacrificing the scale of colour to its own actual, achieved end. One
misses the heated passion of Watts's best pictures, which flow through
the ordered channel of recognisable expression and make one adore
them as poetry. But there, of a truth, invidious comparison ends,
and reticence shall ever guard the space that intervenes betwixt the
grounds sacred to the exposition of the embodiment of these master
lights.