man work may be: wrought to radiance
beyond that of the ruby and opal, its inartificialness prevents it from
arresting the attention it is intended only to direct; were it composed
with more science it would become vulgar from the loss of its
unconsciousness; if richer, it must have parted with its purity, if
deeper, with its joyfulness, if more subdued, with its sincerity.
Passages are, indeed, sometimes unsuccessful; but it is to be judged in
its rapture, and forgiven in its fall: he who works by law and system
may be blamed when he sinks below the line above which he proposes no
elevation, but to him whose eyes are on a mark far off, and whose
efforts are impulsive, and to the utmost of his strength, we may not
unkindly count the slips of his sometime descent into the valley of
humiliation.

89. The concluding notice of Angelico is true and interesting, though
rendered obscure by useless recurrence to the favorite theory.

* * *

"Such are the surviving works of a painter, who has recently been as
unduly extolled as he had for three centuries past been unduly
depreciated,--depreciated, through the amalgamation during those
centuries of the principle of which he was the representative with
baser, or at least less precious matter--extolled, through the
recurrence to that principle, in its pure, unsophisticated essence, in
the present --in a word, to the simple Imaginative Christianity of the
middle ages, as opposed to the complex Reasoning Christianity of recent
times. Creeds therefore are at issue, and no exclusive partisan, neither
Catholic nor Protestant in the absolute sense of the terms, can fairly
appreciate Fra Angelico. Nevertheless, to those who regard society as
progressive through the gradual development of the component elements of
human nature, and who believe that Providence has accommodated the mind
of man, individually, to the perception of half-truths only, in order to
create that antagonism from which Truth is generated in the abstract,
and by which the progression is effected, his rank and position in art
are clear and definite. All that Spirit could achieve by herself,
anterior to that struggle with Intellect and Sense which she must in all
cases pass through in order to work out her destiny, was accomplished by
him. Last and most gifted of a long and imaginative race--the heir of
their experience, with collateral advantages which they possessed
not--and flourishing at the mome