ons of the soul. It is only as
allegories in a large sense, comprehending both the physical and
intellectual order, and capable of various interpretation, that any of
these statues can be understood. Even the Dukes do not pretend to be
portraits, and hence in part perhaps the uncertainty that has gathered
round them. Very tranquil and noble is Twilight: a giant in repose, he
meditates, leaning upon his elbow, looking down. But Dawn starts from
her couch, as though some painful summons had reached her, sunk in
dreamless sleep, and called her forth to suffer. Her waking to
consciousness is like that of one who has been drowned, and who finds
the return to life agony. Before her eyes, seen even through the mists
of slumber, are the ruin and the shame of Italy. Opposite lies Night,
so sorrowful, so utterly absorbed in darkness and the shade of death,
that to shake off that everlasting lethargy seems impossible. Yet she
is not dead. If we raise our voices, she too will stretch her limbs,
and, like her sister, shudder into sensibility with sighs. Only we
must not wake her; for he who fashioned her has told us that her sleep
of stone is great good fortune. Both of these women are large and
brawny, unlike the Fates of Pheidias, in their muscular maturity. The
burden of Michelangelo's thought was too tremendous to be borne by
virginal and graceful beings. He had to make women no less capable of
suffering, no less world-wearied, than his country.

"Standing before these statues, we do not cry, How beautiful! We
murmur, How terrible, how grand! Yet, after long gazing, we find them
gifted with beauty beyond grace. In each of them there is a
palpitating thought, torn from the artist's soul and crystallised in
marble. It has been said that architecture is petrified music. In the
Sacristy of S. Lorenzo we feel impelled to remember phrases of
Beethoven. Each of these statues becomes for us a passion, fit for
musical expression, but turned like Niobe to stone. They have the
intellectual vagueness, the emotional certainty, that belong to the
motives of a symphony. In their allegories, left without a key,
sculpture has passed beyond her old domain of placid concrete form.
The anguish of intolerable emotion, the quickening of the
consciousness to a sense of suffering, the acceptance of the
inevitable, the strife of the soul with destiny, the burden and the
passion of mankind:--that is what they contain in their cold
chisel-tortured marble