celestial errands.

Of this last landscape the poetic merit is as great as the artistic excellence is unrivalled. Whoever has made pictures and handled colors knows well that a subject pitched on a high key of light is vastly more difficult to manage than one of which the highest light is not above the middle tint. To keep on that high key which belongs to broad daylight, and yet preserve harmony, repose, and atmosphere, is in the highest degree difficult; but here it is successfully done, and again reminds us of the Paul Veronese treatment. Though a quiet picture, it is full of brilliancy. It represents a broad and partly shaded expanse, full, also, of light and sweet sunshine, through which the eye travels till it rests on the distant mountain, rising majestically in grand volcanic forms from the horizon plains. The sky is filled with cloudy veils, floating, prismatic; some quiet water, crossed by a bridge which rests on round arches, is in the middle distance; and a few trees near the foreground form the group from which rises the stone-pine, which is the principal feature in the picture, and gives it its character. As I write this, I fear that any reader who has not seen the picture to which I refer will immediately think of Turner's Italian landscapes, so familiar to all the world through engravings, where a stone-pine is lifted against the sky as a mass of dark to contrast with the mass of light necessarily in the same region of the picture. But such effects, however legitimate and powerful in the hands of Turner, were not in Allston's manner; they would ruin and break the still harmony which was the law of his mind and of his compositions. Under this tree, on the path, fall flickering spots of sunshine, in which sit or stand two or three figures. The scarlet and white of their dresses, catching the sunshine, make the few high notes that cause the whole piece to throb like music.

There is also a large Swiss landscape, possessing in an extraordinary degree the pure, keen atmosphere, as well as the grand mountain forms, of the Alpine spaces. To look on this piece exhilarates as does the sight of the Alps themselves; and it strikes the eye as a shrill trumpet sound the ear. This landscape, a grand antithesis to the last described, marks a great range of power in the mind that produced them both.

But Allston was not a landscape-painter. His landscapes are few in number, though great in excellence. They are poetic in the truest sense; they are laden with thought and life, and are of "imagination all compact." They transport the beholder to a fairer world, where, through and behind the lovely superficies of things, he sees the hidden ideal of each member,—of rock, sea, sky, earth, and forest,—and feels by a clear magnetism that he is in presence of the very truth of things.

We now come to a class of Allston's pictures which are known chiefly, perhaps only, in Boston. They are justly prized by their owners as possessions of inestimable value; they are the works that more than others display his peculiar genius. I allude to certain ideal heads and figures called by these names: "Beatrice," "Rosalie," "The Bride," "The Spanish Girl," "The Evening Hymn," "The Tuscan Girl," "Miriam," "The Valentine," "Lorenzo and Jessica," "The Flight of Florimel," "The Roman Lady," and others; and I shall give a short description of the most important of these, sometimes in my own words, and sometimes in those of one who is the only writer I can find who has said anything distinctive about the works of Allston. I refer to William Ware, who died in the act of preparing a course of lectures on the Genius of Allston,—a task for which he was well qualified by his artistic organization, his long study of Art, and his clear appreciation of Allston's power.

In these smaller ideal pieces Allston seems to have found his own genius, so peculiar are they, so different from the works of all other masters, and so divine in their expressive repose. I say divine in their repose with full intention; for this is a repose, not idle and voluptuous, not poetic and dreamy, but a repose full of life, a repose which commands and controls the beholder, and stirs within him that idealism that lies deep hidden in every mind. These pieces consist of heads and figures, mostly single, distinct as individuals, and each a heaven of beauty in itself.

The method of this artist was to suppress all the coarser beauties which make up the substance of common pictures. He was the least ad captandum of workers. He avoided bright eyes, curls, and contours, glancing lights, strong contrasts, and colors too crude for harmony. He reduced his beauty to her elements, so that an inner beauty might play through her features. Like the Catholic discipline which pales the face of the novice with vigils, seclusion, and fasting, and thus makes room and clears the way for the movements of the spirit, so in these figures every vulgar grace is suppressed. No classic contours, no languishing attitudes, no asking for admiration,—but a severe and chaste restraint, a modest sweetness, a slumbering intellectual atmosphere, a graceful self-possession, eyes so sincere and pure that heaven's light shines through them, and, beyond all, a hovering spiritual life that makes each form a presence.

Perhaps the two most remarkable and original of the pieces I have named above are the "Beatrice" and the "Rosalie." Of the "Beatrice" there has been much discussion whether she could have been intended to represent the Beatrice of Dante. To me it appears that there is nothing like that world- and heaven-renowned lady in this our Beatrice. She sits alone: one sees that in the expression of her eyes. Her dress is of almost conventual simplicity; the colors rich, but sober; the style flowing and mediæval. She has soft brown hair; soft, velvet-soft, brown eyes; features not salient, but rounded into the contours of the head; her whole expression receptive, yet radiant with sentiment. The complexion of a tender rose, equally diffused, gives an indescribable air of healthful delicacy to the face. The expression of the whole figure is that of one in a very dream of sentiment. Her twilight eyes see without effort into the very soul of things, as other eyes look at their surfaces. The sentiment of this figure is so powerful that by its gentle charm it fastens the beholder, who gazes and cannot withdraw his eyes, wondering what is the spell that can so hold him to that face, which is hardly beautiful, surely without surface beauty. I once heard a person who was unaccustomed to the use of critical terms say of these creations of Allston, "Here is beauty, but not the beauty that glares on you"; and this phrase, so odd, but so original, well describes the beauty of this Beatrice, who, though now transfigured by sentiment and capable of being a home-goddess, does not seem intended to shine in starry circles.

But for the beauty of execution in this picture, it is unsurpassed. It is in this respect like the most beautiful things ever painted by Raphael,—like the Madonna del Cardellino, whose face has light within, "luce di dentro," as is the expressive Italian phrase,—and is also like another picture that I have seen, attributed to Raphael, in the collection of the late Baron Kestner at Rome.

Visiting the extremely curious and valuable gallery of this gentleman, the Hanoverian Minister at Rome, after making us begin at the beginning, among the very early masters, he led us on with courteous determination through his specimens of all the schools, and made us observe the characteristics of each school and each master, till at last we rested in the last room, where hung a single picture covered with a silken curtain. This at last, with sacred and reverent ceremony, was drawn aside, and revealed a portrait by Raphael,—the portrait of a lady, young and beautiful, and glowing with a tender sentiment which recalled to my remembrance these