ly;
Yet still are breathing, and shed round at noon
A twofold influence,--only to be felt--
A light, a darkness, mingling each with each;
Both, and yet neither. There, from age to age,
Two ghosts are sitting on their sepulchres.
That is the Duke Lorenzo. Mark him well.
He meditates, his head upon his hand.
What from beneath his helm-like bonnet scowls?
Is it a face, or but an eyeless skull?
'Tis lost in shade; yet, like the basilisk,
It fascinates, and is intolerable.
His mien is noble, most majestical!
Then most so, when the distant choir is heard
At morn or eve--nor fail thou to attend
On that thrice-hallowed day, when all are there;
When all, propitiating with solemn songs,
Visit the Dead. Then wilt thou feel his power!"

It is strange that this should be the only written instance (as far
as I recollect) of just and entire appreciation of Michael Angelo's
spiritual power. It is perhaps owing to the very intensity of his
imagination that he has been so little understood--for, as I before
said, imagination can never be met by vanity, nor without
earnestness. His Florentine followers saw in him an anatomist and
posture-master--and art was finally destroyed by the influence over
admiring idiocy of the greatest mind that art ever inspired.

[68] I have not chosen to interrupt the argument respecting the
essence of the imaginative faculty by any remarks on the execution
of the imaginative hand; but we can hardly leave Tintoret and
Michael Angelo without some notice of the pre-eminent power of
execution exhibited by both of them, in consequence of their vigor
and clearness of conception; nor without again warning the lower
artist from confounding this velocity of decision and impatience
with the velocity of affectation or indolence. Every result of real
imagination we have seen to be a truth of some sort; and it is the
characteristic of truth to be in some way tangible, seizable,
distinguishable, and clear, as it is of falsehood to be obscure,
confused, and confusing. Not but that many, if not most truths have
a dark side, a side by which they are connected with mysteries too
high for