Conclusion [1] Legei pou Herakleitos hoti panta chorei kai ouden menei.[2] TO regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without–our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the […]

ABOUT the middle of the seventeenth century, two opposite views of a question, upon which neither Scripture, nor Council, nor Pope, had spoken with authority–the question as to the amount of freedom left to man by the overpowering work of divine grace upon him–had seemed likely for a moment to divide the Roman Church into […]

TITIAN, as we see him in what some have thought his noblest work, the large altar-piece, dated 1522, his forty-fifth year, of SS. Nazaro e Celso, at Brescia, is certainly a religious–a great, religious painter. The famous Gabriel of the Annunciation, aflight, in all the effortless energy of an angel indeed, and Sebastian, adapted, it […]

THE greatest and purest of Gothic churches, Notre-Dame d’Amiens, illustrates, by its fine qualities, a characteristic secular movement of the beginning of the thirteenth century. Philosophic writers of French history have explained how, in that and in the two preceding centuries, a great number of the more important towns in eastern and northern France rose […]

As you discern the long unbroken line of its roof, low-pitched for France, above the cottages and willow-shaded streams of the place, you might think the abbey church of Pontigny, the largest Cistercian church now remaining, only a great farm-building. On a nearer view there is something unpretending, something pleasantly English, in the plain grey […]

[1] “CONSECUTIVE upon Apollo in all his solar fervour and effulgence,” says a writer of Teutonic proclivities, “we may discern even among the Greeks themselves, elusively, as would be natural with such a being, almost like a mock sun amid the mists, the northern or ultra-northern sun-god. In hints and fragments the lexicographers and others […]

FOR one born in eighteen hundred and three much was recently become incredible that had at least warmed the imagination even of the sceptical eighteenth century. Napoleon, sealing the tomb of the Revolution, had foreclosed many a problem, extinguished many a hope, in the sphere of practice. And the mental parallel was drawn by Heine. […]

By his immense productiveness, by the even perfection of what he produced, its fitness to its own day, its hold on posterity, in the suavity of his life, some would add in the “opportunity” of his early death, Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness, of the good fortune, of genius. Yet, if […]