he name, too, because the distinctive
feature of this youth's character was his lively sense of the beautiful
in Nature and Art,--a sense so keen, that his mind was, so to speak,
merely the shadowing forth of the ideal or material beauty scattered
through-out the works of God and man. This feeling was the result of
his exquisite and almost morbid sensibility,--morbid, at least, until
time had somewhat blunted it. We would sometimes, in allusion to those
who, from their ardent longings to revisit their country, are called
home-sick, say that he was heaven-sick, and he would smile, and say
that we were right.

This love of the beautiful made him unhappy; in another situation it
might have rendered him illustrious. Had he held a pencil he would have
painted the Virgin of Foligno; as a sculptor, he would have chiselled
the Psyche of Canova; had he known the language in which sounds are
written, he would have noted the aerial lament of the sea breeze
sighing among the fibres of Italian pines, or the breathing of a
sleeping girl who dreams of one she will not name; had he been a poet,
he would have written the stanzas of Tasso's "Erminia," the moonlight
talk of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," or Byron's portrait of
Haidee.

He loved the good as well as the beautiful, but he loved not virtue for
its holiness, he loved it for its beauty. He would have been aspiring
in imagination, although he was not ambitious by character. Had he
lived in those ancient republics where men attained their full
development through liberty, as the free, unfettered body develops
itself in pure air and open sunshine, he would have aspired to every
summit like Caesar, he would have spoken as Demosthenes, and would have
died as Cato. But his inglorious and obscure destiny confined him,
against his will, in speculative inaction,--he had wings to spread, and
no surrounding air to bear them up. He died young, straining his gaze
into the future, and ardently surveying the space over which he was
never to travel.

Every one knows the youthful portrait of Raphael to which I have
alluded. It represents a youth of sixteen, whose face is somewhat paled
by the rays of a Roman sun, but on whose cheek still blooms the soft
down of childhood. A glancing ray of light seems to play on the velvet
of the cheek. He leans his elbow on a table; the arm is bent upwards to
support the head, which rests on the palm of the hand, and the
admirably modelled fingers are l