And then a certain writer has said: "To have known a great and
exalted love, and have had it flee from your grasp--flee as a shadow
before it is sullied by selfishness or misunderstanding--is the
highest good. The memory of such a love can not die from out the
heart. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the sordid impulses of life,
and though it gives an unutterable sadness, it imparts an
unspeakable peace."


Raphael's father followed the boy's mother when the lad was eleven
years old. We know the tender, poetic love this father had for the
child, and we realize somewhat of the mystical mingling in the man's
heart of the love for the woman dead and her child alive.
Reverencing the mother's wish that the boy should be an artist,
Giovanni Sanzio, proud of his delicate and spiritual beauty, took
the lad to visit all the other artists in the vicinity. They also
visited the ducal palace, built by Federigo the Second, and lingered
there for hours, viewing the paintings, statuary, carvings,
tapestries and panelings.

The palace still stands, and is yet one of the most noble in Italy,
vying in picturesqueness with those marble piles that line the Grand
Canal at Venice. We know that Giovanni Sanzio contributed by his
advice and skill to the wealth of beauty in the palace, and we know
that he was always a welcome visitor there. From his boyhood Raphael
was familiar with these artistic splendors, and how much this early
environment contributed to his correct taste and habit of subdued
elegance, no man can say. When Giovanni Sanzio realized that death
was at his door, he gave Raphael into the keeping of the priest
Bartolomeo and the boy's stepmother. The typical stepmother lives,