his wonderful figure. Who has
ever seen the ocean in repose, in its awful sleep, that smooths it
like glass, yet cannot level its unfathomed swell? So seems to us the
repose of this tremendous personification of strength: the laboring
eye heaves on its slumbering sea of muscles, and trembles like a skiff
as it passes over them: but the silent intimations of the spirit
beneath at length become audible; the startled imagination hears it
in its rage, sees it in motion, and sees its resistless might in
the passive wrecks that follow the uproar. And this from a piece of
marble, cold, immovable, lifeless! Surely there is that in man, which
the senses cannot reach, nor the plumb of the understanding sound.

Let us turn now to the Apollo called Belvedere. In this supernal
being, the human form seems to have been assumed as if to make visible
the harmonious confluence of the pure ideas of grace, fleetness, and
majesty; nor do we think it too fanciful to add celestial splendor;
for such, in effect, are the thoughts which crowd, or rather rush,
into the mind on first beholding it. Who that saw it in what may be
called the place of its glory, the Gallery of Napoleon, ever thought
of it as a man, much less as a statue; but did not feel rather as if
the vision before him were of another world,--of one who had just
lighted on the earth, and with a step so ethereal, that the next
instant he would vault into the air? If I may be permitted to recall
the impression which it made on myself, I know not that I could better
describe it than as a sudden intellectual flash, filling the whole
mind with light,--and light in motion. It seemed to the mind what the
first sight of the sun is to the senses, as it emerges from the ocean;
when from a point of light the whole orb at once appears to bound from
the waters, and to dart its rays, as by a visible explosion, through
the profound of space. But, as the deified Sun, how completely is the
conception verified in the thoughts that follow the effulgent original
and its marble counterpart! Perennial youth, perennial brightness,
follow them both. Who can imagine the old age of the sun? As soon
may we think of an old Apollo. Now all this may be ascribed to the
imagination of the beholder. Granted,--yet will it not thus be
explained away. For that is the very faculty addressed by every work
of Genius,--whose nature is _suggestive_; and only when it
excites to or awakens congenial thoughts and emotions, f