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Averroes lies prostrate beneath his feet with his book face downwards, lightning-smitten by a shaft from the leaves of the volume in the saint's hand, whereon is written: veritatem meditabitur guttur meum et labia mea detestabuntur impium.
The Crucifixion, with its agonising deity and prostrate groups of women, sunk below the grief of tears; the Temptation in the wilderness, with its passionate contrast of the grey-robed Man of Sorrows and the ruby-winged, voluptuous fiend; the Temptation of Adam in Eden, a glowing allegory of the fascination of the spirit by the flesh; Paradise, a tempest of souls, whirled like Lucretian atoms or gold dust in sunbeams by the celestial forces that perform the movement of the spheres; the Destruction of the world, where all the fountains and rivers and lakes and seas of earth have formed one cataract, that thunders with cities and nations on its rapids down a bottomless gulf; while all the winds and hurricanes of the air have grown into one blast, that carries men like dead leaves up to judgment; the Plague of the fiery serpents, with multitudes encoiled and writhing on a burning waste of sand; the Massacre of the Innocents, with its spilth of blood on slippery pavements of porphyry and serpentine; the Delivery of the tables of the law to Moses amid clouds on Sinai, a white ascetic, lightning-smitten man emerging in the glory of apparent godhead; the anguish of the Magdalen above her martyred God; the solemn silence of Christ before the throne of Pilate; the rushing of the wings of Seraphim, and the clangour of the trumpet that awakes the dead; these are the soul-stirring themes that Tintoretto handles with the ease of mastery.
There he stood, a towering shape, like a lightning-smitten statue, and cursed us, especially Bastin. "My daughter has gone!" he cried, "burned up by the fiery power that is my servant. Nothing remains of her but dust, and, Priest, this is your doing.
And, God wot, they may well be wiser herein than we are. A demented countryman, respected as a saint by reason of his madness, a thing of rags and tatters and woefully unkempt hair, a quite wild creature, more than six feet high, and gaunt as a lightning-smitten pine, came down the deserted bazaar of the brass-workers. He carried a long staff in one hand, a bright tin bowl in the other.
But the name of another was on the covering slab, and no small token was to be found indicative of the last resting place of the lightning-smitten body of James Otis, the prophetic giant of the pre-revolutionary days.
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