ng garments, the ring glittering upon the
bride's fingers, the metal and fashion of the wine pots; for at such
seasons there is leisure and luxury to be curious. But in a "day of
judgment," or in a "day of lesser horrors, yet divine," as at the
impious feast of Belshazzar, the eye should see, as the actual eye of
an agent or patient in the immediate scene would see, only in masses
and indistinction. Not only the female attire and jewelry exposed
to the critical eye of the fashion, as minutely as the dresses in
a lady's magazine, in the criticised picture,--but perhaps the
curiosities of anatomical science, and studied diversities of posture
in the falling angels and sinners of Michael Angelo,--have no business
in their great subjects. There was no leisure of them.

By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting got at their
true conclusions; by not showing the actual appearances, that is, all
that was to be seen at any given moment by an indifferent eye, but
only what the eye might be supposed to see in the doing or suffering
of some portentous action. Suppose the moment of the swallowing up of
Pompeii. There they were to be seen--houses, columns, architectural
proportions, differences of public and private buildings, men and
women at their standing occupations, the diversified thousand
postures, attitudes, dresses, in some confusion truly, but physically
they were visible. But what eye saw them at that eclipsing moment,
which reduces confusion to a kind of unity, and when the senses
are upturned from their proprieties, when sight and hearing are a
feeling only? A thousand years have passed, and we are at leisure to
contemplate the weaver fixed standing at his shuttle, the baker at his
oven, and to turn over with antiquarian coolness the pots and pans of
Pompeii.

"Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeah, and thou, Moon, in the valley of
Ajalon." Who, in reading this magnificent Hebraism, in his conception,
sees aught but the heroic son of Nun, with the out-stretched arm,
and the greater and lesser light obsequious? Doubtless there were to
be seen hill and dale, and chariots and horsemen, on open plain, or
winding by secret defiles, and all the circumstances and stratagems
of war. But whose eyes would have been conscious of this array at the
interposition of the synchronic miracle? Yet in the picture of this
subject by the artist of the "Belshazzar's Feast"--no ignoble work
either--the marshalling and landscape of t