lderness full of fruit trees, birds, and butterflies, little Ishmael
lying at the root of a tree, and the spent bottle under another; Hagar
in prayer, and the angel appearing to her out of a wreathed line of
gloomily undulating clouds, which, with a dark-rayed sun in the midst,
surmount the entire composition in two arches, out of which descend
shafts of (I suppose) beneficent rain; leaving, however, room, in the
corner opposite to Ishmael's angel, for Isaac's, who stays Abraham in
the sacrifice; the ram in the thicket, the squirrel in the plum tree
above him, and the grapes, pears, apples, roses, and daisies of the
foreground, being all wrought with involution of such ingenious
needlework as may well rank, in the patience, the natural skill, and the
innocent pleasure of it, with the truest works of Florentine engraving.
Nay; the actual tradition of many of the forms of ancient art is in many
places evident,--as, for instance, in the spiral summits of the flames
of the wood on the altar, which are like a group of first-springing
fern. On the wall opposite is a smaller composition, representing
Justice with her balance and sword, standing between the sun and moon,
with a background of pinks, borage, and corn-cockle: a third is only a
cluster of tulips and iris, with two Byzantine peacocks; but the spirits
of Penelope and Ariadne reign vivid in all the work--and the richness of
pleasurable fancy is as great still, in these silken labors, as in the
marble arches and golden roof of the cathedral of Monreale.

But what is the use of explaining or analyzing it? Such work as this
means the patience and simplicity of all feminine life; and can be
produced, among _us_ at least, no more. Gothic tracery itself, another
of the instinctive labyrinthine intricacies of old, though analyzed to
its last section, has become now the symbol only of a foolish
ecclesiastical sect, retained for their shibboleth, joyless and
powerless for all good. The very labyrinth of the grass and flowers of
our fields, though dissected to its last leaf, is yet bitten bare, or
trampled to slime, by the Minotaur of our lust; and for the traceried
spire of the poplar by the brook, we possess but the four-square furnace
tower, to mingle its smoke with heaven's thunder-clouds.[BE]

We will look yet at one sampler more of the engraved work, done in the
happy time when flowers were pure, youth simple, and imagination
gay,--Botticelli's Libyan Sibyl.

Glance bac