a giant in repose, he meditates, leaning upon his elbow, looking down.  But Dawn starts from her couch, as though some painful summons had reached her, sunk in dreamless sleep, and called her forth to suffer.  Her waking to consciousness is like that of one who has been drowned, and who finds the return to life agony.  Before her eyes, seen even through the mists of slumber, are the ruin and the shame of Italy.  Opposite lies Night, so sorrowful, so utterly absorbed in darkness and the shade of death, that to shake off that everlasting lethargy seems impossible.  Yet she is not dead.  If we raise our voices, she too will stretch her limbs, and, like her sister, shudder into sensibility with sighs.  Only we must not wake her; for he who fashioned her has told us that her sleep of stone is great good fortune.  Both of these women are large and brawny, unlike the Fates of Pheidias, in their muscular maturity.  The burden of Michelangelo’s thought was too tremendous to be borne by virginal and graceful beings.  He had to make women no less capable of suffering, no less world-wearied, than his country.

“Standing before these statues, we do not cry, How beautiful!  We murmur, How terrible, how grand!  Yet, after long gazing, we find them gifted with beauty beyond grace.  In each of them there is a palpitating thought, torn from the artist’s soul and crystallised in marble.  It has been said that architecture is petrified music.  In the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo we feel impelled to remember phrases of Beethoven.  Each of these statues becomes for us a passion, fit for musical expression, but turned like Niobe to stone.  They have the intellectual vagueness, the emotional certainty, that belong to the motives of a symphony.  In their allegories, left without a key, sculpture has passed beyond her old domain of placid concrete form.  The anguish of intolerable emotion, the quickening of the consciousness to a sense of suffering, the acceptance of the inevitable, the strife of the soul with destiny, the burden and the passion of mankind:—­that is what they contain in their cold chisel-tortured marble.  It is open to critics of the school of Lessing to object that here is the suicide of sculpture.  It is easy to remark that those strained postures and writhen limbs may have perverted the taste of lesser craftsmen.  Yet if Michelangelo was called to carve Medicean statues after the sack of Rome and the fall of Florence—­if he was obliged in sober sadness to make sculpture a fit language for his sorrow-laden heart—­how could he have wrought more truthfully than this?  To imitate him without sharing his emotion or comprehending his thoughts, as the soulless artists of the decadence attempted, was without all doubt a grievous error.  Surely also we may regret, not without reason, that in the evil days upon which he had fallen, the fair antique Heiterkeit and Allgemeinheit were beyond his reach.”

That this regret is not wholly sentimental may be proved, I think, by an exchange of verses, which we owe to Vasari’s literary sagacity.  He tells us that when the statue of the Night was opened to the public view, it drew forth the following quatrain from an author unknown to himself by name:—­