implies what is most perfect, not in any one man or woman, but in men and women collectively.  Hence the greatest of painters rarely have stooped to landscape painting, since no imaginary landscape can surpass what everybody has seen in nature.  You cannot improve on the colors of the rainbow, or the gilded clouds of sunset, or the shadows of the mountain, or the graceful form of trees, or the varied tints of leaves and flowers; but you can represent the figure of a man or woman more beautiful than any one man or woman that has ever appeared.  What mortal woman ever expressed the ethereal beauty depicted in a Madonna of Raphael or Murillo?  And what man ever had such a sublimity of aspect and figure as the creations of Michael Angelo?  Why, “a beggar,” says one of his greatest critics, “arose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his infants are men, and his men are giants.”  And, says another critic, “he is the inventor of epic painting, in that sublime circle of the Sistine Chapel which exhibits the origin, progress, and final dispensation of the theocracy.  He has personified motion in the cartoon of Pisa, portrayed meditation in the prophets and sibyls of the Sistine Chapel and in the Last Judgment, traced every attitude which varies the human body, with every passion which sways the human soul.”  His supremacy is in the mighty soaring of his intellectual conceptions.  Marvellous as a creator, like Shakspeare; profound and solemn, like Dante; representing power even in repose, and giving to the Cyclopean forms which he has called into being a charm of moral excellence which secures our sympathy; a firm believer in a supreme and personal God; disciplined in worldly trials, and glowing in lofty conceptions of justice,—­he delights in portraying the stern prophets of Israel, surrounded with an atmosphere of holiness, yet breathing compassion on those whom they denounce; august in dignity, yet melting with tenderness; solemn, sad, profound.  Thus was his influence pure and exalted in an art which has too often been prostituted to please the perverted taste of a sensual age.  The most refined and expressive of all the arts,—­as it sometimes is, and always should be,—­is the one which oftenest appeals to that which Christianity teaches us to shun.  You may say, “Evil to him who evil thinks,” especially ye pure and immaculate persons who have walked uncorrupted amid the galleries of Paris, Dresden.  Florence, and Rome; but I fancy that pictures, like books, are what we choose to make them, and that the more exquisite the art by which vice is divested of its grossness, but not of its subtle poisons,—­like the New Heloise of Rousseau or the Wilhelm Meister of Goethe,—­the more fatally will it lead astray by the insidious entrance of an evil spirit in the guise of an angel of light.  Art, like literature, is neither good nor evil abstractly, but may become a savor of death unto death, as well as of life unto life.  You