o the good--the seed-catching into the seed-nourishing. Of
the too consumptions let us prefer the active, benevolent, and
purifying one of fire, to the passive, self-eating, and corrupting
one of rust: one half minute's clear shining may touch some watching
and waiting soul, and through him kindle whole ages of light.

_Christian._ Men do not stumble over what they know; and the day
fades so imperceptibly into night that were it not for experience,
darkness would surprise us long before we believed the day done: and,
in relation to art, its revolutions are still more imperceptible in
their gradations; and, in fulfilling themselves, they spread over
such an extent of time, that in their knowledge the experience of one
artist is next to nothing; and its twilight is so lengthy, that those
who never saw other, believe its gloom to be day; nor are their
successors more aware that the deepening darkness is the contrary,
until night drops big like a great clap of thunder, and awakes them
staringly to a pitiable sense of their condition. But, if we cannot
have this experience through ourselves, we can through others; and
that will show us that Pagan art has once--nay twice--already brought
over Christian art a "darkness which might be felt;" from a little
handful cloud out of the studio of Squarcione, it gathered density
and volume through his scholar Mantegna--made itself a nucleus in the
Academy of the Medici, and thence it issued in such a flood of
"heathenesse" that Italy finally became covered with one vast deep
and thick night of Pagandom. But in every deep there is a lower deep;
and, through the same gods-worship, a night intenser still fell upon
art when the pantomime of David made its appearance. With these two
fearful lessons before his eyes, the modern artist can have no other
than a settled conviction that Pagan art, Devil-like, glozes but to
seduce--tempts but to betray; and hence, he chooses to avoid that
which he believes to be bad, and to follow that which he holds to be
good, and blots out from his eye and memory all art between the
present and its first taint of heathenism, and ascends to the art
previous to Raffaelle; and he ascends thither, not so much for its
forms as he does for its THOUGHT and NATURE--the root and trunk of
the art-tree, of whose numerous branches form is only one--though the
most important one: and he goes to pre-Raffaelle art for those two
things, because the stream at that point is clea