montories flow into their craggy forms, and the splendour of their fusion filling millions of miles of the void space, like the tail of a comet, so looking, so delighting in his work. God sees his machine spinning round the sun, and delights in its success, and has taken out patents to supply all the suns in space with the same manufacture. Your boat will be to the ocean of water, what this earth is to the ocean of ether-a prosperous and swift voyager. When shall we see you all! You not, I suppose, till your boat is ready to sail-and then, if not before, I must, of course, come to Livorno. Our plans for the winter are yet scarcely defined; they tend towards our spending February and March at Pisa, where our communications will not be so distant, nor so epistolary. C left us a week ago, not without many lamentations, as all true lovers pay on such occasions. He is to write me an account of the Trieste steam-boat, which I will transmit to you. Mrs. Shelley, and Miss Ckindest salutations, with interest. return you their Most affectionately yours, LETTER XXXII. To LEIGH HUNT, Esq, Florence, Nov. 23, 1819. MY DEAR HUNT,-Why don't you write to us? I was preparing to send you something for your "Indicator," but I have been a drone instead of a bee in this business, thinking that perhaps, as you did not acknowledge any of my late enclosures, it would not be welcome to you, whatever I might send. What a state England is in! But you will never write politics. I don't wonder; but I wish, then, that you would write a paper in the "Examiner 99 on the actual state of the country, and what, under all circumstances of the conflicting passions and interests of men, we are to expect. Not what we ought to expect, nor what, if so and so were to happen, we might expect ;-but what, as things are, there is reason to believe will come; --and send it me for my information. Every word a man has to say is valuable to the public now; and thus you will at once gratify your friend, nay, instruct, and either exhilarate him, or force him to be resigned, and awaken the minds of the people. I have no spirits to write what I do not know whether you will care much about; I know well that if I were in great misery, poverty, &c., you would think of nothing else but how to amuse and elieve me. You omit me if I am prosperous. I could laugh, if I found a joke, in order to put you in good-humour with me after my scolding; in good humour enough to write to us. Affectionate love to and from all. This ought not only to be the Vale of a letter, but a superscription over the gate of life. Your sincere friend, P. B. SHELLEY. I send you a sonnet. I don't expect you to publish it, but you may show it to whom you please. LETTER XXXIII. To LEIGH HUNT, Esq. Florence, November, 1819. MY DEAR FRIEND,-Two letters, both bearing date Oct. 20, arrive on the same day; one is always glad of twins. We hear of a box arrived at Genoa with books and clothes; it must be yours. Meanwhile the babe is wrapt in flannel petticoats, and we get on with him as we can. He is small, healthy, and pretty. Mary is recovering rapidly. Marianne, I hope, is quite well. You do not tell me whether you have received my lines on the Manchester affair. They are of the exoteric species, and are meant, not for the 66 Indicator," but the "Examiner." I would send for the former, if you like, some letters on such subjects of art as suggest themselves in Italy. Perhaps I will, at a venture, send you a specimen of what I mean next post. I enclose you in this a piece for the "Examiner," or let it share the fate, whatever that fate may be, of the "Masque of Anarchy." I am sorry to hear that you have employed yourself in translating the "Aminta," though I doubt not it will be a just and beautiful translation. You ought to write Amintas. You ought to exercise your fancy in the perpetual creation of new forms of gentleness and beauty. With respect to translation, even I will not be seduced by it; although the Greek plays, and some of the ideal dramas of Calderon, (with which I have lately, and with inexpressible wonder and delight, become acquainted) are perpetually tempting me to throw over their perfect and glowing forms the grey veil of my own words. And you know me too well to suspect that I refrain from a belief that what I could substitute for them would deserve the regret which yours would, if suppressed. I have confidence in my moral sense alone; but that is a kind of originality. I have only translated the Cyclops of Euripides, when I could absolutely do nothing else; and the Symposium of *Peter Bell the Third. MY DEAR HE127, You, as I said, it say vineminta to de say, ai tha zixaminar ie entanglemenL I wd you 484 doars, or ordinary francesconi, I mapipione, best you will tell me what you receive in Tusan money, if they are not the produce of £100. Wo my heart is a little lightened, which, I ARRUFS you, was heavy enough until this moment, on your secount, I write to Messrs. Ward to pay you. I have received no satisfactory letter from my bankers, but I must expect it every week-or, at least, in a month from this date, when I will not fail to transmit you the remainder of what may be Everybody here is talking of a steam-ship which is building at Leghorn; one person said, as if he know the whole affair, that he was waiting in Tuscany to take his departure to Naples in it. Your name has not, to my knowledge, been Mentioned, I think you would do well to enFourage this publicity. I have better health than I have known for a tise már, l henry imi, by the Car 31 y 12 The ven time, and the paved the Meiner other arvametLo so far well that cus serece weather. I send you ent cesconi, which is designates a han ir in the money of th no difference to us. I have just fini "Prometheus," whic and which will be e before it is transmitt engaged in a politica and if the faculties prisoned within a m cares and vulgar diffic thing-but as it is Mary is well-but think her spirits woul what can I-what ou picture to yourself my Adieu, my dear frie Ever yours, faithi LETTER XXXVI. To JOHN GISBORNE, Esq. MY DEAR SIR,-We have suddenly taken the determination to avail ourselves of this lovely weather to approach you as far as Pisa. I need not assure you—unless my malady should violently return-you will see me at Leghorn. We embark; and I promise myself the delight of the sky, the water, and the mountains. I must suffer at any rate, but I expect to suffer less in a boat than in a carriage. I have many things to say, which let me reserve till we meet. I sympathise in all your good news, as I have done in your ill. Let Henry take care of himself, and not, desiring to combine too many advantages, check the progress of his recovery, the greatest of all. Remember me affectionately to him and to Mrs. Gisborne, and accept for yourself my unalterable sentiments of regard. Meanwhile, consider well your plans, which I only half understand. Ever most faithfully yours, Florence, 25th Jan., 1820. REMARKS ON SOME OF THE STATUES IN THE GALLERY OF FLORENCE. THE NIOBE. Or all that remains to us of Greek antiquity, this figure is perhaps the most consummate personification of loveliness, with regard to its countenance, as that of the Venus of the Tribune is with regard to its entire form of a woman. It is colossal: the size adds to its value; because it allows the spectator the choice of a greater number of points of view, and affords him a more analytical one, in which to catch a greater number of the infinite modes of expression, of which any form approaching ideal beauty is necessarily composed. It is the figure of a mother in the act of sheltering, from some divine and inevitable peril, the last, we may imagine, of her surviving children. The little creature, terrified, as we may conceive, at the strange destruction of all its kindred, has fled to its mother, and is hiding its head in the folds of her robe, and casting back one arm, as in a passionate appeal for defence, where it never before could have been sought in vain. She is clothed in a thin tunic of delicate woof; and her hair is fastened on her head into a knot probably by that mother whose care will never fasten it again. Niobe is enveloped in profuse drapery, a portion of which the left hand has gathered up, and is in the act of extending it over the child in the instinct of shielding her from what reason knows to be inevitable. The right (as the restorer has properly imagined), is drawing up her daughter to her; and with that instinctive gesture, and by its gentle pressure, is encouraging the child to believe that it can give security. The countenance of Niobe is the consummation of feminine majesty and loveliness, beyond which the imagination scarcely doubts that it can conceive anything. That masterpiece of the poetic harmony of marble expresses other feelings. There is embodied a sense of the inevitable and rapid destiny which is consummating around her, as if it were already over. It seems as if despair and beauty had combined, and produced nothing but the sublimity of grief. As the motions of the form expressed the instinctive sense of the possibility of protecting the child, and the accustomed and affectionate assurance that she would find an asylum within her arms, so reason and imagination speak in the countenance the certainty that no mortal defence is of avail. There is no terror in the countenance, only grief-deep, remediless grief. There is no anger :-of what avail is indignation against what is known to be omnipotent? There is no selfish shrinking from personal pain-there is no panic at supernatural agency-there is no adverting to herself as herself; the calamity is mightier than to leave scope for such emotions. Everything is swallowed up in sorrow; she is all tears; her countenance, in assured expectation of the arrow piercing its last victim in her embrace, is fixed on her omnipotent enemy. The pathetic beauty of the expression of her tender, and inexhaustible, and unquenchable despair, is beyond the effect of any other sculpture. As soon as the arrow shall pierce her last tie upon earth, the fable that she was turned into stone, or dissolved into a fountain of tears, will be but a feeble emblem of the sadness of hopelessness, in which the few and evil years of her remaining life, we feel, must flow away. It is difficult to speak of the beauty of the countenance, or to make intelligible in words, from what such astonishing loveliness results. The head, resting somewhat backward upon the full and flowing contour of the neck, is as in the act of watching an event momently to arrive. The hair is delicately divided on the forehead, and a gentle beauty gleams from the broad and clear forehead, over which its strings are drawn. The face is of an oval fulness, and the features conceived with the daring of a sense of power. In this respect it resembles the careless majesty which Nature stamps upon the rare masterpieces of her creation, harmonizing them as it were from the harmony of the spirit within. Yet all this not only consists with, but is the cause of, the subtlest delicacy of clear and tender beauty-the expression at once of innocence and sublimity of soul-of purity and strength-of all that which touches the most removed and divine of the chords that make music in our thoughts-of that which shakes with astonishment even the most superficial. THE MINERVA. The head is of the highest beauty. It has a close helmet, from which the hair, delicately parted on the forehead, half escapes. The attitude gives entire effect to the perfect form of the neck, and to that full and beautiful moulding of the lower part of the face and mouth, which is in living beings the seat of the expression of a simplicity and integrity of nature. Her face, upraised to heaven, is animated with a profound, sweet, and impassioned melancholy, with an earnest, and fervid, and disinterested pleading against some vast and inevitable wrong. It is the joy and poetry of sorrow, making grief beautiful, and giving it that nameless feeling which, from the imperfection of language, we call pain, but which is not all pain, through a feeling which makes not only its possessor, but the spectator of it, prefer it to what is called pleasure, in which all is not pleasure. It is difficult to think that this head, though of the highest ideal beauty, is the head of Minerva, although the attributes and attitude of the lower part of the statue certainly suggest that idea. The Greeks rarely, in their representations of the characters of their gods, unless we call the poetic enthusiasm of Apollo a mortal passion,-expressed the disturbance of human feeling; and here is deep and impassioned grief animating a divine countenance. It is, indeed, divine. Wisdom (which Minerva may be supposed to emblem) is pleading earnestly with Power, -and invested with the expression of that grief, because it must ever plead so vainly. The drapery of the statue, the gentle beauty of the feet, and the grace of the attitude, are what may be seen in many other statues belonging to that astonishing era which produced it ;-such a countenance is seen in few. This statue happens to be placed on a pedestal, the subject of whose reliefs is in a spirit wholly the reverse. It was probably an altar to Bacchuspossibly a funeral urn. Under the festoons of fruits and flowers that grace the pedestal, the corners of which are ornamented with the skulls of goats, are sculptured some figures of Manads under the inspir be conceived mo gestures, touching tortion, into whi forms are thrown that exceeds the borders on the ut The tremendous drunkenness, prod seems to have cau to bear them over of a tempest have waterspout, or as t whirls the autumns full eddies. The caught in the tem motion; their heads a strange delirium up to heaven, whils in the energy of the One represents A in one hand, and second has a spear the Thyrsus; anot tuousness; the fo tambourine. This was indeed a in Greece, where it w ideal beauty, and poe with the wild error Rome it had a mo appearance; it was exact apprehensions strict morals were vi deep injury, little an Greeks, who turned judice, murder, madn ON THE VENUS, She has just issued animated with the enj She seems all soft a curved lines of her fin with a never-ending s face expresses a brea cent voluptuousness, lips, without the sublin passion, the grandeur of the Apollo of the C like the Apollo Belvide arch, yet pure and aff mode in which the ends in, yet lifted or half-op for ever circles round curve into which the tinguishable desire, and the lower lip, as in the listlessness of passive joy, they are all wailing at, I know not; whether the express love, still love. Her eyes seem heavy and swimming with pleasure, and her small forehead fades on both sides into that sweet swelling and thin declension of the bone over the eye, in the mode which expresses simple and tender feelings. The neck is full, and panting as with the aspiration of delight, and flows with gentle curves into her perfect form. Her form is indeed perfect. She is half-sitting and half-rising from a shell, and the fulness of her limbs, and their complete roundness and perfection, do not diminish the vital energy with which they seem to be animated. The position of the arms, which are lovely beyond imagination, is natural, unaffected, and easy. This, perhaps, is the finest personification of Venus, the deity of superficial desire, in all antique statuary. Her pointed and pear-like person, ever virgin, and her attitude modesty itself. A BAS-RELIEF: PROBABLY THE SIDES OF A SARCOPHAGUS. The lady is lying on a couch, supported by a young woman, and looking extremely exhausted; her dishevelled hair is floating about her shoulders, and she is half-covered with drapery that falls on the couch. Her tunic is exactly like a chemise, only the sleeves are longer, coming half way down the upper part of the arm. An old wrinkled woman, with a cloak over her head, and an enormously sagacious look, has a most professional appearance, and is taking hold of her arm gently with one hand, and with the other is supporting it. I think she is feeling her pulse. At the side of the couch sits a woman as in grief, holding her head in her hands. At the bottom of the bed is another matron tearing her hair, and in the act of screaming out most violently, which she seems, however, by the rest of her gestures, to do with the utmost deliberation, as having come to the resolution, that it was a correct thing to do so. Behind her is a gossip of the most ludicrous ugliness, crying, I suppose, or praying, for her arms are crossed upon her neck. There is also a fifth setting up a wail. To the left of the couch a nurse is sitting on the ground dandling the child in her arms, and wholly occupied in so doing. The infant is swaddled. Behind her is a female who appears to be in the act of rushing in with dishevelled hair and violent gesture, and in one hand brandishing a whip or a thunderbolt. This is probably some emblematic person, the messenger of death, or a fury, whose Personification would be a key to the whole. What lady is dying, or the father has directed the child to be exposed: but if the mother be not dead, such a tumult would kill a woman in the straw in these days. The other compartment, in the second scene of the drama, tells the story of the presentation of the child to its father. An old man has it in his arms, and, with professional and mysterious officiousness, is holding it out to the father. The father, a middle-aged and very respectable-looking man, perhaps not long married, is looking with the admiration of a bachelor on his first child, and perhaps thinking that he was once such a strange little creature himself. His hands are clasped, and he is gathering up between his arms the folds of his cloak; an emblem of his gathering up all his faculties, to understand the tale the gossip is bringing. An old man is standing beside him, probably his father, with some curiosity, and much tenderness in his looks. Around are collected a host of his relations, of whom the youngest, a handsome girl, seems the least concerned. It is altogether an admirable piece, quite in the spirit of the comedies of Terence. MICHAEL ANGELO'S BACCHUS. The countenance of this figure is a most revolting mistake of the spirit and meaning of Bacchus. It looks drunken, brutal, narrow-minded, and has an expression of dissoluteness the most revolting. The lower part of the figure is stiff, and the manner in which the shoulders are united to the breast, and the neck to the head, abundantly inharmonious. It is altogether without unity, as was the idea of the deity of Bacchus in the conception of a Catholic. On the other hand, considered only as a piece of workmanship, it has many merits. The arms are executed in a style of the most perfect and manly beauty. The body is conceived with great energy, and the manner in which the lines mingle into each other, of the highest boldness and truth. It wants unity as a work of art -as a representation of Bacchus it wants everything A JUNO. A statue of great merit. The countenance expresses a stern and unquestioned severity of dominion, with a certain sadness. The lips are beautiful-susceptible of expressing scorn-but not without sweetness. With fine lips a person is never wholly bad, and they never belong to the expression of emotions wholly selfish-lips being the seat of imagination. The drapery is finely conceived |
