e pleasure in the
play of life, the power of motion and variety; before the old strength
of sight and of flight had passed from weary wing and clouding eye, the
old pride and energy of enjoyment had gone out of hand and heart. How
the change fell upon him, and how it wrought, any one may see who
compares his later with his earlier works, with the series, for
instance, of outlines representing the story of St. John Baptist in the
desolate little cloister of Lo Scalzo. In these mural designs there is
such exultation and exuberance of young power, of fresh passion and
imagination, that only by the innate grace can one recognize the hand of
the master whom hitherto we know by the works of his after life, when
the gift of grace had survived the gift of invention. This and all other
gifts it did survive; all pleasure of life and power of mind, all the
conscience of the man, his will, his character, his troubles, his
triumphs, his sin and honour, heart-break and shame. All these his charm
of touch, his sweetness of execution, his "Elysian beauty, melancholy
grace," outlived, and blossomed in their dust. Turn from that cloistral
series to those later pictures, painted when he was "faultless" and
nothing more; and seeing all the growth and all the gain, all the change
and all the loss, one to whom the second was unknown would feel and
foreknow his story and his sorrow. In the cloister, what life and
fullness of growing and strengthening genius, what joyous sense of its
growth and the fair field before it, what dramatic delight in character
and action! where St. John preaches in the wilderness and the few first
listeners are gathered together at his feet, old people and poor,
soul-stricken, silent--women with worn still faces, and a spirit in
their tired aged eyes that feeds heartily and hungrily on his words--all
the haggard funereal group filled from the fountain of his faith with
gradual fire and white-heat of soul; or where Salome dances before
Herod, an incarnate figure of music, grave and graceful, light and
glad, the song of a bird made flesh, with perfect poise of her sweet
slight body from the maiden face to the melodious feet; no tyrannous or
treacherous goddess of deadly beauty, but a simple virgin, with the cold
charm of girlhood and the mobile charm of childhood; as indifferent and
innocent when she stands before Herodias and when she receives the
severed head of John with her slender and steady hands; a pure bright
a