nt when the transition was actually
taking place from the youth to the early manhood of Europe; he gave
full, unreserved, and enthusiastic expression to that Love and Hope
which had winged the Faith of Christendom in her flight towards heaven
for fourteen centuries,--to those yearnings of the Heart and the
Imagination which ever precede, in Universal as well as Individual
development, the severer and more chastened intelligence of
Reason."--Vol. iii., pp. 188-190.

* * *

90. We must again repeat that if our author wishes to be truly
serviceable to the schools of England, he must express himself in terms
requiring less laborious translation. Clearing the above statement of
its mysticism and metaphor, it amounts only to this,--that Fra Angelico
was a man of (humanly speaking) _perfect_ piety--humility, charity, and
faith--that he never employed his art but as a means of expressing his
love to God and man, and with the view, single, simple, and
straightforward, of glory to the Creator, and good to the Creature.
Every quality or subject of art by which these ends were not to be
attained, or to be attained secondarily only, he rejected; from all
study of art, as such, he withdrew; whatever might merely please the
eye, or interest the intellect, he despised, and refused; he used his
colors and lines, as David his harp, after a kingly fashion, for
purposes of praise and not of science. To this grace and gift of
holiness were added, those of a fervent imagination, vivid invention,
keen sense of loveliness in lines and colors, unwearied energy, and to
all these gifts the crowning one of quietness of life and mind, while
yet his convent-cell was at first within view, and afterwards in the
center, of a city which had lead of all the world in Intellect, and in
whose streets he might see daily and hourly the noblest setting of manly
features. It would perhaps be well to wait until we find another man
thus actuated, thus endowed, and thus circumstanced, before we speak of
"unduly extolling" the works of Fra Angelico.

91. His artistical attainments, as might be conjectured, are nothing
more than the development, through practice, of his natural powers in
accordance with his sacred instincts. His power of expression by bodily
gesture is greater even than Giotto's, wherever he could feel or
comprehend the passion to be expressed; but so inherent in him was his
holy tranquillity of mind, that he could not by any e