in round them drew,
And siren Sloth a dull quietus sung."

The remarks which have been here made, would, in some measure, lead to a
solution of the question of the comparative merits of painting and poetry.
I do not mean to give any preference, but it should seem that the argument
which has been sometimes set up, that painting must affect the
imagination more strongly, because it represents the image more
distinctly, is not well founded. We may assume without much temerity, that
poetry is more poetical than painting. When artists or connoisseurs talk
on stilts about the poetry of painting, they shew that they know little
about poetry, and have little love for the art. Painting gives the object
itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in
itself: poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected
with it. But this last is the proper province of the imagination. Again,
as it relates to passion, painting gives the event, poetry the progress of
events: but it is during the progress, in the interval of expectation and
suspense, while our hopes and fears are strained to the highest pitch of
breathless agony, that the pinch of the interest lies

"Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
The mortal instruments are then in council;
And the state of man, like to a little kingdom,
Suffers then the nature of an insurrection."

But by the time that the picture is painted, all is over. Faces are the
best part of a picture; but even faces are not what we chiefly remember in
what interests us most.--But it may be asked then, Is there any thing
better than Claude Lorraine's landscapes, than Titian's portraits, than
Raphael's cartoons, or the Greek statues? Of the two first I shall say
nothing, as they are evidently picturesque, rather than imaginative.
Raphael's cartoons are certainly the finest comments that ever were made
on the Scriptures. Would their effect be the same if we were not
acquainted with the text? But the New Testament existed before the
cartoons. There is one subject of which there is no cartoon, Christ
washing the feet of the disciples the night before his death. But that
chapter does not need a commentary! It is for want of some such
resting-place for the imagination that the Greek statues are little else
than specious forms. They are marble to the touch and to the heart. They
have