hat Spirit 'that doth prefer before all
temples the upright heart and pure;' and never before or since was
earthly material worked up into soul, nor earthly forms refined into
spirit, as under the hands of this devout painter. He became sublime
through trusting goodness and humility. It was as if Paradise had opened
upon him--a Paradise of rest and joy, of purity and love, where no
trouble, no guile, no change could enter; and if his celestial
creations lack force, we feel that before these ethereal beings, power
itself would be powerless; his angels are resistless in their soft
serenity; his virgins are pure from all earthly stain; his redeemed
spirits in meek rapture glide into Paradise; his martyrs and confessors
are absorbed in devout ecstasy. Well has he been named IL BEATO E
ANGELICO, whose life was participate with the angels even in this world.
Is it not clear that Fra Angelico had found the Realm of the Artist; the
fair and happy clime of the Ideal?

Our readers must not confound the ideal with the imaginary: the ideal is
rather that which the real requires to invest it with that beauty which
it would have possessed had the spirits of Death and sin never thrown
their dark shadows over God's perfect work. Let not the poet fear the
reproach that his characters are too _ideal_; if harmoniously
constructed, but _true_ in the higher sense, such reproach is praise.

Man rises spontaneously from the perception of the finite beauty of
creatures to the conception of the sovereign beauty of the Creator,
which idea has indeed its first condition in the perception of the
senses; but it passes on until it extends its sphere through all our
faculties, all our moral life, until the distant vision of Absolute
Beauty attracts us from the limited sphere of the senses to the realm of
the ideal. Thus the artist, that he may appease the insatiate thirst for
Absolute Beauty, which ever pursues him, strives to bring down upon
earth the divine but veiled images, which he beholds in that fair clime.

Every work of art implies three acts of the intellect: an act, by which
the artist conceives the pure idea, the soul of his creation; an act, by
which he conceives or invents the form in which he is to incarnate this
idea, the body of his creation; and, lastly, a conception of the
relations between the pure idea and its material form, the rendering of
the body a fit vehicle and indwelling-place for the soul. Three
acts--but an artist of