that no other dome can ever be built so
grand, so beautiful. But above St. Peter's hangs the blue tent-dome of the
sky, vaster, rounder, elastic, unfathomable, making St. Peter's look small
as a drinking-cup, shutting it soon out of sight to north, east, south,
and west, by the mysterious horizon-fold which no man can lift. And beyond
this horizon-fold of our sky shut down again other domes, which the wisest
astronomer may not measure, in whose distances our little ball and we,
with all our spinning, can hardly show like a star. If St. Peter's were
swallowed up to-morrow, it would make no real odds to anybody but the
Pope. The probabilities are that Michel Angelo himself has forgotten all
about it.

Titian and Raphael, and all the great brotherhood of painters, may kneel
reverently as priests before Nature's face, and paint pictures at sight of
which all men's eyes shall fill with grateful tears; and yet all men shall
go away, and find that the green shade of a tree, the light on a young
girl's face, the sleep of a child, the flowering of a flower, are to their
pictures as living life to beautiful death.

Coming to Art's two highest spheres,--music of sound and music of
speech,--we find that Beethoven and Mozart, and Milton and Shakespeare,
have written. But the symphony is sacred only because, and only so far as,
it renders the joy or the sorrow which we have felt. Surely, the
interpretation is less than the thing interpreted. Face to face with a
joy, a sorrow, would a symphony avail us? And, as for words, who shall
express their feebleness in midst of strength? The fettered helplessness
in spite of which they soar to such heights? The most perfect sentence
ever written bears to the thing it meant to say the relation which the
chemist's formula does to the thing he handles, names, analyzes, can
destroy, perhaps, but cannot make. Every element in the crystal, the
liquid, can be weighed, assigned, and rightly called; nothing in all
science is more wonderful than an exact chemical formula; but, after all
is done, will remain for ever unknown the one subtle secret, the vital
centre of the whole.

But the souls who have a "genius for affection" have no outer dome, no
higher and more vital beauty; no subtle secret of creative motive force to
elude their grasp, mock their endeavor, overshadow their lives. The
subtlest essence of the thing they worship and desire, they have in their
own nature,--they are. No schools, no stan