If any works of man ever deserved the name of divine, they
are the _Holy Families_ of Raphael.

Superficial writers will ask, what has Raphael to do with Virgil? mere
artists will enquire, how they are to be benefited by the study of Tasso?
Those, again, who have reflected on the means by which the higher stages
in any art are attained, will acknowledge that, at a certain elevation,
their principles are the same.

To move the heart, whether by painting, poetry, or eloquence, requires the
same mind. The means by which the effect is to be produced are not
different. The one works, indeed, with the pencil, the other with the pen;
the one composes in verse, the other in prose--but what then? These are
the means to the end, they are not the end itself. There are many avenues
to the human heart, but the inner doors in them all are to be opened only
by one key, and that key is never denied to the suit of genius.

It is in his lesser pieces that the exquisite taste and divine conceptions
of Raphael are chiefly to be seen. His greater paintings, the
_Transfiguration_, the frescoes in the Vatican, the cartoons, are
invaluable to the artist as studies, and specimens of the utmost power of
drawing and energy of conception; but it is not there that the divine
Raphael appears. In the larger ones his object was to cover space and
display talent; and in the prosecution of these objects he never has been
exceeded; but it is in his groups of two or three figures that his
exquisite conceptions appear. It is there that he has given free scope to
his exquisite conception, intended to represent in the maternal, and
therefore universally felt affection, the divine spirit and parental
tenderness of the gospel. "My son, give me thy heart," was what he always
aimed at. "God is love," the idea which he ever strove to represent, as
embodying the essence of the Christian faith. The Madonna della Seggiola
at Florence, the Assumption of the Virgin at Dresden, the Madonna di
Foligno in the Vatican, the Holy Family at Naples, St John in the Desert
in the Tribune at Florence, the small Holy Family in the Louvre, the large
Holy Family, with the flowers, brought from Fontainbleau, also in the
Louvre, St Mark at Munich, and several of the lesser pieces of Raphael in
the same rich collection in that city, are so many gems of art, embodying
this conception, which to the end of the world, even when preserved only
in the shadowy imitation of engraving, will