he war is everything, the
miracle sinks into an anecdote of the day; and the eye may "dart
through rank and file traverse" for some minutes, before it shall
discover, among his armed followers, _which is Joshua_! Not modern art
alone, but ancient, where only it is to be found if anywhere, can be
detected erring, from defect of this imaginative faculty. The world
has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting, transcending the
figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes, in the great picture at
Angerstein's. It seems a thing between two beings. A ghastly horror
at itself struggles with newly-apprehending gratitude at second life
bestowed. It cannot forget that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt
that it is a body. It has to tell of the world of spirits.--Was it
from a feeling, that the crowd of half-impassioned by-standers, and
the still more irrelevant herd of passers-by at a distance, who have
not heard or but faintly have been told of the passing miracle,
admirable as they are in design and hue--for it is a glorified
work--do not respond adequately to the action--that the single figure
of the Lazarus has been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the mighty
Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the greater half of the
interest? Now that there were not indifferent passers-by within actual
scope of the eyes of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound
of it had but faintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood
to deny; but would they see them? or can the mind in the conception of
it admit of such unconcerning objects? can it think of them at all? or
what associating league to the imagination can there be between the
seers, and the seers not, of a presential miracle?

Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a Dryad, we will ask
whether, in the present low state of expectation, the patron would
not, or ought not to be fully satisfied with a beautiful naked figure
recumbent under wide-stretched oaks? Disseat those woods, and place
the same figure among fountains, and falls of pellucid water, and
you have a--Naiad! Not so in a rough print we have seen after Julio
Romano, we think--for it is long since--_there_, by no process, with
mere change of scene, could the figure have reciprocated characters.
Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, beautiful in
convolution and distortion, linked to her connatural tree, co-twisting
with its limbs her own, till both seemed either--these, ani