two great departments of art. All who went be fore them, and all who follow after them, may be ranged under the banners, of one or the other of these great kings and leaders. Under the banners of Raphael appear the majestic thinkers in art, the Florentine and Roman painters of the fif teenth and sixteenth centuries; and Albert Durer, in Germany. Ranged on the side of Titian appear the Venetian, the Lombard, the Spanish, and Flemish masters. When a school of art arose which aimed at uniting the characteristics of both, what was the result? A something second-hand

and neutral-the school of the Academicians and the Mannerists, a crowd of painters, who neither felt what they saw, nor saw what they felt; who trusted neither to the God within them, nor the nature around them; and who ended by giving us Form without Soul-Beauty without Life.

I once heard it said, by a celebrated connoisseur of the present day, "that there were but three inventors or originators in modern art-Giorgione, Correggio, and Rembrandt. Each of these broke up a new path for himself; they were inventors, inasmuch as they saw nature truly, yet under an aspect which had never before been rendered through the medium of art. Raphael had the antique, and Titian had Giorgione, as precursors and models." This is true; and yet to impugn the originality of Raphael and Titian, is like impugning the originality of Shakspeare. They, like him, did not hesitate to use, as means, the material pre

sented to them by the minds of others. They, like him, had minds of such universal and unequalled capacity, that all other originalities seem to be swallowed up-comprehended, as it were, in theirs. How much, in point of framework and material, Shakspeare adopted, unhesitatingly, from the playwrights of his time is sufficiently known; how frankly Raphael borrowed a figure from one of his contemporaries, or a group from the Antique, is notorious to all who have studied his works.

I know that there are critics who look upon Raphael as having secularized, and Titian as having sensualized art; I know it has become a fashion to prefer an old Florentine or Umbrian Madonna to Raphael's Galatea; and an old German hardvisaged, wooden-limbed saint to Titian's Venus. Under one point of view, I quite agree with the critics alluded to. Such preference commands our approbation and our sympathy, if we look to the height of the aim proposed, rather than to the completeness of the performance as such. But here I am not considering art with reference to its aims or its associations, religious or classic; nor with reference to individual tastes, whether they lean to piety or poetry, to the real or the ideal; nor as the reflection of any prevailing mode of belief or existence; but simply as ART, as the Muta Poesis, the interpreter between nature and man; giving back to us her forms with the utmost truth of imitation, and, at the same time, clothing them with a high signifi

cance derived from the human purpose and the human intellect.

If, for instance, we are to consider painting as purely religious, we must go back to the infancy of modern art, when the expression of sentiment was all in all, and the expression of life in action nothing; when, reversing the aim of Greek art, the limbs and form were defective, while character, as it is shown in physiognomy, was delicately felt and truly rendered. And if, on the other hand, we are to consider art merely as perfect imitation, we must go to the Dutchmen of the seventeenth century. Art is only perfection when it fills us with the idea of perfection; when we are not called on to supply deficiencies, or to set limits to our demands; and this lifting up of the heart and soul, this fulness of satisfaction and delight, we find in the works of Raphael and Titian. In this only alike-in all else, how different! Different as were the men themselves-the antipodes of each other!

In another place, I might be tempted to pursue the comparison, or rather contrast, between these two worshippers and high-priests of the Beautiful, in all other respects so unlike-working, as one might say, under a different dispensation. But Raphael, elsewhere the god of my idolatry, seems here-at Venice-to have become to me like a distant star, and the system of which he is the amazing central orb or planet, for awhile removed and comparatively dim; while Titian reigns at hand,

the present deity, the bright informing sun of this enchanted world, this sea-girt city, where light, and color, and beauty are, "wherever we look, wherever we move." In Venice, I see everywhere Titian; as in his pictures, I see, or rather I feel, Venice; not the mere external features of the locality, not the material Venice-buildings, churches, canals—but a spirit which is nowhere else on earth to be perceived, felt, or understood, but here! Here, where we float about as in a waking dream-here, where all is at once so old and so new-so familiar and so wonderful-so fresh to the fancy, and so intimate to the memory! These palaces, with their arabesque façades and carved balconies, and portals green with seaweed; and these tall towering belfries, and these blackgliding gondolas, have we not seen them a thousand and a thousand times reproduced to fancy, in pictures vivid and real as themselves? And yet, every time we come upon them, though it were ten times in an hour, do we not feel inclined to clap our hands, and exclaim aloud, like delighted children when the curtain draws up at their first play? O! to make children of us again, nothing like Venice!

And so it is with Titian's pictures: they make children of us again; they surprise us with the feeling of a presence; they melt us with a familiar sympathy; we rejoice in them as we do in music, in spring-tide, in the fresh air and morning breath of flowers. It is long before we can bring the in

tellect to bear on them, for the faculties of judg ment and comparison are lost in the perception of beauty, in admiration, in faith unbounded. In them we acknowledge that "touch of nature which makes the whole world kin." And where but at Venice could Titian have lived and worked? I know not well how or why it is, but color, which seems elsewhere an accidental property of things, seems to be here a substance, an existence, a part of one's very life and soul;-color vivid and intense, broken by reflected lights flung from glanc ing waters, and enhanced by strange contrasts of wide-spread sunny seas, and close-shut shadowy courtyards, overgrown with vines, or roses, or creeping verdure in all the luxury of neglect, each with its well and overhanging fig-tree in the midst. These court yards, haunts of quiet seclusion and mystery, in which I should think is concentred the Venetian idea of a home-how few who visit Venice know of their cool, silent, picturesque recesses! Yet to understand and feel Titian aright, we ought to know Venice thoroughly, -its cortili as well as its canals; for it is precisely these peculiar, these merely local characteristics this subdued gloom in the midst of dazzling sun. shine; this splendor of hue deepened, not darkened, by shade; this seclusion in the midst of vastness; this homeliness in the midst of grandeur; this artlessness in the midst of art; this repose in the midst of the fulness of life; which we feel like in Titian's pictures, and in Venice.