t joy and thankfulness to hours passed in gazing upon the faded
and faint touches of feeble hands, and listening through the stillness
of uninvaded cloisters for fall of voices now almost spent; yet he is
never contracted into the bigot, nor inflamed into the enthusiast; he
never loses his memory of the outside world, never quits nor compromises
his severe and reflective Protestantism, never gives ground of offense
by despite or forgetfulness of any order of merit or period of effort.
And the tone of his address to our present schools is therefore neither
scornful nor peremptory; his hope, consisting with full apprehension of
all that we have lost, is based on a strict and stern estimate of our
power, position, and resource, compelling the assent even of the least
sanguine to his expectancy of the revelation of a new world of Spiritual
Beauty, of which whosoever

* * *

"will dedicate his talents, as the bondsman of love, to his Redeemer's
glory and the good of mankind, may become the priest and interpreter, by
adopting in the first instance, and re-issuing with that outward
investiture which the assiduous study of all that is beautiful, either
in Grecian sculpture, or the later but less spiritual schools of
painting, has enabled him to supply, such of its bright ideas as he
finds imprisoned in the early and imperfect efforts of art--and
secondly, by exploring further on his own account in the untrodden
realms of feeling that lie before him, and calling into palpable
existence visions as bright, as pure, and as immortal as those that have
already, in the golden days of Raphael and Perugino, obeyed their
creative mandate, Live!" (Vol. iii., p. 422).[5]

* * *

22. But while we thus defer to the discrimination, respect the feeling,
and join in the hope of the author, we earnestly deprecate the frequent
assertion, as we entirely deny the accuracy or propriety, of the
metaphysical analogies, in accordance with which his work has unhappily
been arranged. Though these had been as carefully, as they are crudely,
considered, it had still been no light error of judgment to thrust them
with dogmatism so abrupt into the forefront of a work whose purpose is
assuredly as much to win to the truth as to demonstrate it. The writer
has apparently forgotten that of the men to whom he must primarily look
for the working out of his anticipations, the most part are of limited
knowledge and inveterat