they do not preoccupy us like Edwin
Drood or Kubla Khan. Had that revolving chair at Gad's Hill become
empty but a few weeks later than it actually did, or had Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in the act of setting down his dream about the Eastern
potentate not been interrupted by 'a person on business from Porlock'
and so lost the thread of the thing for ever, from two what delightful
glades for roaming in would our fancy be excluded! The very globe we
live on is a far more fascinating sphere than it can have been when men
supposed that men like themselves would be on it to the end of time. It
is only since we heard what Darwin had to say, only since we have had
to accept as improvisible what lies far ahead, that the Book of Life
has taken so strong a hold on us and 'once taken up, cannot,' as the
reviewers say, 'readily be laid down.' The work doesn't strike us as a
masterpiece yet, certainly; but who knows that it isn't--that it won't
be, judged as a whole?

For sheer creativeness, no human artist, I take it, has a higher repute
than Michael Angelo; none perhaps has a repute so high. But what if
Michael Angelo had been a little more persevering? All those years he
spent in the process of just a-going to begin Pope Julius' tomb, and
again, all those blank spaces for his pictures and bare pedestals for
his statues in the Baptistery of San Lorenzo--ought we to regret them
quite so passionately as we do? His patrons were apt to think him an
impossible person to deal with. But I suspect that there may have been
a certain high cunning in what appeared to be a mere lovable fault of
temperament. When Michael Angelo actually did bring a thing off, the
result was not always more than magnificent. His David is magnificent,
but it isn't David. One is duly awed, but, to see the master at
his best, back one goes from the Accademia to that marvellous bleak
Baptistery which he left that we should see, in the mind's eye, just
that very best.

It was there, some years ago, as I stood before the half-done marvel of
the Night and Morning, that I first conceived the idea of a museum of
incomplete masterpieces. And now I mean to organise the thing on my own
account. The Baptistery itself, so full of unfulfilment, and with such
a wealth, at present, of spare space, will be the ideal setting for my
treasures. There be it that the public shall throng to steep itself in
the splendour of possibilities, beholding, under glass, and perhaps in
excellen