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The idea of a man or of a dead body being there shocked me violently, and I cried to my brother, "Tell me, what is it?" At that instant the light from. Raffaelle's candles fell in a somewhat different direction. It lighted up the white bowl of a human skull, and I saw that what I had taken for a man's form was instead that of a clothed skeleton.

This latter is often all the decoration which is needed, and none can be more beautiful; it has been spoken against, like many other good and lovely things, because it has been too often used in extravagant degrees, like the well-known twisting of the pillars in Raffaelle's "Beautiful gate."

Michael Angelo's works have a strong, peculiar, and marked character; they seem to proceed from his own mind entirely, and that mind so rich and abundant, that he never needed, or seemed to disdain, to look abroad for foreign help. Raffaelle's materials are generally borrowed, though the noble structure is his own.

My soul was an enchanted boat Which, like a sleeping swan, did float Upon the silver waves of her sweet singing. Half-unconscious, I looked up. Before me hung a copy of Raffaelle's cartoon of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes. As my eye wandered over it, it seemed to blend into harmony with the feelings which the poem had stirred. I seemed to float upon the glassy lake.

Among the paintings of this palace, the most beautiful are Raffaelle's frescos in the stanze and loggie. The principal oil paintings are in the appartamento Borgia, which also contains the Transfiguration, by Raphael. In the Sistine chapel is the Last Judgment by Michael Angelo.

A righteous enforcement of exact truth in our day has led many into a readiness to appreciate more really the minute imitation of a satin dress, or a red herring, than the noblest figure in the best of Raffaelle's cartoons. Much good should come of the diffusion of this wise little book.

"Ah!" cried he one day, stopping suddenly before a print-shop, "how that reminds me of my dear, dear mother." "Which?" said I, eagerly, puzzled between an engraving of Raffaelle's "Madonna" and another of "The Brigand's Wife." Vivian did not satisfy my curiosity, but drew me on in spite of my reluctance. "You loved your mother, then?" said I, after a pause. "Yes, as a whelp may a tigress."

Peter on the high altar, he will relate to you how for three centuries the divine Raffaelle's Transfiguration was worshipped in that spot; how it was carried away by the French in 1809, and restored to the pope by the Allies in 1814.

By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on the leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy, with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and heads thrown back in ecstasy.

Hawthorne, arriving in Concord a little later than I, brought me the photograph of Raffaelle's original sketch of Dante, and from you. It appears to be a fixed idea in your mind to benefit and delight me, and still in ingenious and surprising ways. Well, I am glad that my lot is cast in the time and proximity of excellent persons, even if I do not often see their faces.