ook, the one towards the other, but
they never see each other. They exist quite single and isolated, each
unconscious that there is any other. Another--indeed, there is no other;
in reality, every one is in complete solitude; it is only the canvas
which makes them appear in the same place. They are not in the same
place, or rather there is no place; the soft green field, the blue
hills, darkening against the greenish evening sky, the spare, thinly
leaved little trees, the white tower in the distance, this little piece
of Umbrian country has nothing to do with any of them. They are nowhere;
or rather each taken singly is nowhere. Place, like subject and action,
has been eliminated; everything has, which possibly could. The very
bodies seem reduced to the least possible: there is no interest in them:
all is concentrated upon the delicate nervous hands, on the faces; in
the faces, upon eyes and mouth, till the whole face seems scarcely more
than tremulous lips, half parted, raised vividly to kiss, to suck in the
impalpable; than dilating pupils, straining vaguely to seize, to absorb,
to burn into themselves the invisible. It is the embodiment, with only
as little body as is absolutely required, of a soul; and that soul
simplified, rarefied into only one condition of being: beatitude of
contemplation. As place and action have been eliminated, so also has
time: they will for ever remain, alone, in the same attitude; they will
never move, never change, never cease; there exists for them no other
occupation or possibility. And as the bodies are separate, isolated from
all physical objects, so is the soul: it touches no other human soul,
touches no earthly interest: it is alone, motionless, space and time and
change have ceased for it: contemplating, absorbing for all eternity
that which the eye cannot see, nor the hand touch nor the will
influence, the mysterious, the ineffable.

Are they really saints and angels, and prophets and sibyls? Surely
not--for all such act or suffer; for each of these there is a local
habitation, and a definite duty. These strange creatures of Perugino's
are not supernatural beings in the same sense as are those robed in
iridescent, impalpable glory of Angelico; or those others, clothed in
more than human muscle and sinew, of the vault of the Sixtine. What are
they? Not visions become concrete, but the act of vision personified.
They are not the objects of religious feeling; they are its most
abstra