. She desires immortality, fondly and
vainly, as we do ourselves. She receives, from the love of her _refused_
lover, Apollo, not immortality, but length of life;--her years to be as
the grains of dust in her hand. And even this she finds was a false
desire; and her wise and holy desire at last is--to die. She wastes
away; becomes a shade only, and a voice. The Nations ask her, What
wouldst thou? She answers, Peace; only let my last words be true.
"L'ultimo mie parlar sie verace."

[Illustration: VII.

For a time, and times.]

216. Therefore, if anything is to be conceived, rightly, and chiefly, in
the form of the Cumaean Sibyl, it must be of fading virginal beauty, of
enduring patience, of far-looking into futurity. "For after my death
there shall yet return," she says, "another virgin."

Jam redit et virgo;--redeunt Saturnia regna,
Ultima Cumaei venit jam carminis aetas.

Here then is Botticelli's Cumaean Sibyl. She is armed, for she is the
prophetess of Roman fortitude;--but her faded breast scarcely
raises the corselet; her hair floats, not falls, in waves like the
currents of a river,--the sign of enduring life; the light is full on
her forehead: she looks into the distance as in a dream. It is
impossible for art to gather together more beautifully or intensely
every image which can express her true power, or lead us to understand
her lesson.

[Illustration: VIII.

The Nymph beloved of Apollo.

(MICHAEL ANGELO.)]

217. Now you do not, I am well assured, know one of Michael Angelo's
sibyls from another: unless perhaps the Delphian, whom of course he
makes as beautiful as he can. But of this especially Italian prophetess,
one would have thought he might, at least in some way, have shown that
he knew the history, even if he did not understand it. She might have
had more than one book, at all events, to burn. She might have had a
stray leaf or two fallen at her feet. He could not indeed have painted
her only as a voice; but his anatomical knowledge need not have hindered
him from painting her virginal youth, or her wasting and watching age,
or her inspired hope of a holier future.

218. Opposite,--fortunately, photograph from the figure itself, so that
you can suspect me of no exaggeration,--is Michael Angelo's Cumaean
Sibyl, wasting away. It is by a grotesque and most strange chance that
he should have made the figure of this Sibyl, of all others in the
chapel, the most fleshly and gross, even pr