k at a distance from her dilated eyes; the Erythraean Sibyl,
bareheaded, is about to turn over the page of her book; while the
Delphic Sibyl, like Cassandra the youngest and most human-looking of
them all, holds a scroll in her hand, and gazes with a dreamy
mournfulness into the far futurity. These splendid creations would
abundantly reward the minute study of many days. They show how
thoroughly the great painter had entered into the history and spirit
of these mysterious prophetesses, who, while they bore the sins and
sorrows of a corrupt world, had power to look for consolation into the
secrets of the future.

Very beautiful was this reverence paid to the Sibyl amid all the
idolatries of paganism and the corruptions of later Judaism. We may
regard it as a relic of the early piety of the world. One who could
pass over the interests and distractions of her own time, and fix her
gaze upon the distant future, must have seemed far removed from the
common order of mankind, who live exclusively in the present, and can
imagine no other or higher state of things than they see around them.
Standing as the heirs of all the ages on this elevated vantage-ground
and looking back upon the long course of the centuries--upon the
eventful future of the Sibyl, which is the past to us--it seems a
matter of course that the world should have spun down the ringing
grooves of change as it has done; and we fancy that this must have
been obvious to the world's gray fathers. But though the age of the
Sibyl seemed the very threshold of time, there was nothing to indicate
this to her, nothing to show that she lived in the youth of the world,
and that it was destined to ripen and expand with the process of the
suns. The same horizon that bounds us in these last days, bound her
view in these early days; and things seemed as fully developed and
stereotyped then as now, and to-morrow promised to be only a
repetition of to-day. To realise, therefore, that the world had a
future, and to take the trouble of thinking what would happen a
thousand years off, indicated no common habit of mind.

And we are the more impressed by it when we consider the spots
bewitched by the spell of Circe where it was exercised. That persons
dwelling in lonely, northern isles, where the long wash of the waves
upon the shore, and the wild wail of the wind in mountain corries
stimulated the imagination, and seemed like voices from another world,
should see visions and dream