he gnarled
wood occurs, as far as I know, in no other engravings but this, and the
illustrations to Dante; and I am content to leave it, with little
comment, for the reader's quiet study, as showing the exuberance of
imagination which other men at this time in Italy allowed to waste
itself in idle arabesque, restrained by Botticelli to his most earnest
purposes; and giving the withered tree-trunks, hewn for the rude throne
of the aged prophetess, the same harmony with her fading spirit which
the rose has with youth, or the laurel with victory. Also in its
weird characters, you have the best example I can show you of the orders
of decorative design which are especially expressible by engraving, and
which belong to a group of art instincts scarcely now to be understood,
much less recovered, (the influence of modern naturalistic imitation
being too strong to be conquered)--the instincts, namely, for the
arrangement of pure line, in labyrinthine intricacy, through which the
grace of order may give continual clue. The entire body of ornamental
design, connected with writing, in the Middle Ages seems as if it were a
sensible symbol, to the eye and brain, of the methods of error and
recovery, the minglings of crooked with straight, and perverse with
progressive, which constitute the great problem of human morals and
fate; and when I chose the title for the collected series of these
lectures, I hoped to have justified it by careful analysis of the
methods of labyrinthine ornament, which, made sacred by Theseian
traditions,[BC] and beginning, in imitation of physical truth, with the
spiral waves of the waters of Babylon as the Assyrian carved them,
entangled in their returns the eyes of men, on Greek vase and Christian
manuscript--till they closed in the arabesques which sprang round the
last luxury of Venice and Rome.

But the labyrinth of life itself, and its more and more interwoven
occupation, become too manifold, and too difficult for me; and of the
time wasted in the blind lanes of it, perhaps that spent in analysis or
recommendation of the art to which men's present conduct makes them
insensible, has been chiefly cast away. On the walls of the little room
where I finally revise this lecture,[BD] hangs an old silken sampler of
great-grandame's work: representing the domestic life of Abraham:
chiefly the stories of Isaac and Ishmael. Sarah at her tent-door,
watching, with folded arms, the dismissal of Hagar: above, in a
wi