the waters of the firmament gathered into one white, ghastly
cataract, the river of the wrath of God, roaring down into the gulf
where the world has melted with its fervent heat, choked with the ruin
of nations, and the limbs of its corpses tossed out of its whirling,
like water-wheels. Bat like, out of the holes and caverns and shadows of
the earth, the bones gather, and the clay-heaps heave, rattling and
adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and
struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their
clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet,
like his of old who went his way unseeing to Siloam Pool; shaking off
one by one the dreams of the prison-house, hardly hearing the clangor of
the trumpets of the armies of God, blinded yet more, as they awake, by
the white light of the new Heaven, until the great vortex of the four
winds bears up their bodies to the judgment seat: the firmament is all
full of them, a very dust of human souls, that drifts, and floats, and
falls in the interminable, inevitable light; the bright clouds are
darkened with them as with thick snow, currents of atom life in the
arteries of heaven, now soaring up slowly, farther, and higher, and
higher still, till the eye and the thought can follow no farther, borne
up, wingless, by their inward faith and by the angel powers invisible,
now hurled in countless drifts of horror before the breath of their
condemnation.

Sec. 25. The imaginative verity, how distinguished from realism.

Now, I wish the reader particularly to observe throughout all these
works of Tintoret, the distinction of the imaginative verity from
falsehood on the one hand, and from realism on the other. The power of
every picture depends on the penetration of the imagination into the
TRUE nature of the thing represented, and on the utter scorn of the
imagination for all shackles and fetters of mere external fact that
stand in the way of its suggestiveness. In the Baptism it cuts away the
trunks of trees as if they were so much cloud or vapor, that it may
exhibit to the thought the completed sequency of the scene;[65] in the
Massacre, it covers the marble floor with visionary light, that it may
strike terror into the spectator without condescending to butchery; it
defies the bare fact, but creates in him the fearful feeling; in the
Crucifixion it annihilates locality, and brings the palm-leaves to
Calvary, so only that it m