nd a man worth something; mark his manner of
doing it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could
not have discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it,
unless he had, what we may call, _sympathized_ with it,--had sympathy
in him to bestow on objects. He must have been _sincere_ about it too;
sincere and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the
likeness of any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and
trivial hearsay, about all objects. And indeed may we not say that
intellect altogether expresses itself in this power of discerning what
an object is? Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will come
out here. Is it even of business, a matter to be done? The gifted man
is he who _sees_ the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as
surplusage: it is his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that
he discern the true _likeness_, not the false superficial one, of the
thing he has got to work in. And how much of _morality_ is in the kind
of insight we get of anything; "the eye seeing in all things what it
brought with it the faculty of seeing"! To the mean eye all things are
trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael,
the Painters tell us, is the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No
most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object. In the
commonest human face there lies more than Raphael will take away with
him.

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness
as of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is every way
noble, and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what
qualities in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of
eternal black. A small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into
our very heart of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: _della bella
persona, che mi fu tolta_; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a
solace that _he_ will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these
_alti guai_. And the racking winds, in that _aer bruno_, whirl them
away again, to wail forever!--Strange to think: Dante was the friend
of this poor Francesca's father; Francesca herself may have sat upon
the Poet's knee, as a bright innocent little child. Infinite pity, yet
also infinite rigor of law: it is so Nature is made; it is so Dante
discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his
'Divine Comedy's' being a poor splenetic impotent terrestrial