od I was not altogether a beast as he was.... Suddenly,
on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures'--this was
a gallery containing pictures by Albert Duerer and by the great
Florentines--'I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my
youth, and which had for exactly twenty years been closed from me, as by a
door and window shutters.... Excuse my enthusiasm, or rather madness, for
I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or
graver in my hand, as I used to be in my youth.'

This letter may have been the expression of a moment's enthusiasm, but was
more probably rooted in one of those intuitions of coming technical power
which every creator feels, and learns to rely upon; for all his greatest
work was done, and the principles of his art were formulated, after this
date. Except a word here and there, his writings hitherto had not dealt
with the principles of art except remotely and by implication; but now he
wrote much upon them, and not in obscure symbolic verse, but in emphatic
prose, and explicit if not very poetical rhyme. In his _Descriptive
Catalogue_, in _The Address to the Public_, in the notes on Sir Joshua
Reynolds, in _The Book of Moonlight_--of which some not very dignified
rhymes alone remain--in beautiful detached passages in _The MS. Book_, he
explained spiritual art, and praised the painters of Florence and their
influence, and cursed all that has come of Venice and Holland. The
limitation of his view was from the very intensity of his vision; he was a
too literal realist of imagination, as others are of nature; and because
he believed that the figures seen by the mind's eye, when exalted by
inspiration, were 'eternal existences,' symbols of divine essences, he
hated every grace of style that might obscure their lineaments. To wrap
them about in reflected lights was to do this, and to dwell over-fondly
upon any softness of hair or flesh was to dwell upon that which was least
permanent and least characteristic, for 'The great and golden rule of art,
as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp and wiry the
boundary-line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and
sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and
bungling.' Inspiration was to see the permanent and characteristic in all
forms, and if you had it not, you must needs imitate with a languid mind
the things you saw or remembered, and so sink into the sleep of