are two women and two men; tradition names them “Night” and “Day,” “Twilight” and “Dawning.”  Thus in the statues themselves and in their attendant genii we have a series of abstractions, symbolising the sleep and waking of existence, action and thought, the gloom of death, the lustre of life, and the intermediate states of sadness and of hope that form the borderland of both.  Life is a dream between two slumbers; sleep is death’s twin-brother; night is the shadow of death; death is the gate of life:—­such is the mysterious mythology wrought by the sculptor of the modern world in marble.  All these figures, by the intensity of their expression, the vagueness of their symbolism, force us to think and question.  What, for example, occupies Lorenzo’s brain?  Bending forward, leaning his chin upon his wrist, placing the other hand upon his knee, on what does he for ever ponder?  The sight, as Rogers said well, “fascinates and is intolerable.”  Michael Angelo has shot the beaver of the helmet forward on his forehead, and bowed his head, so as to clothe the face in darkness.  But behind the gloom there is no skull, as Rogers fancied.  The whole frame of the powerful man is instinct with some imperious thought.  Has he outlived his life and fallen upon everlasting contemplation?  Is he brooding, injured and indignant, over his own doom and the extinction of his race?  Is he condemned to witness in immortal immobility the woes of Italy he helped to cause?  Or has the sculptor symbolised in him the burden of that personality we carry with us in this life and bear for ever when we wake into another world?  Beneath this incarnation of oppressive thought there lie, full-length and naked, the figures of Dawn and Twilight, Morn and Evening.  So at least they are commonly called:  and these names are not inappropriate; for the breaking of the day and the approach of night are metaphors for many transient conditions of the soul.  It is only as allegories in a large sense, comprehending both the physical and intellectual order, and capable of various interpretation, that any of these statues can be understood.  Even the Dukes do not pretend to be portraits:  and hence in part perhaps the uncertainty that has gathered round them.  Very tranquil and noble is Twilight:  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 Michael Angelo’s thought was too tremendous to be borne by virginal or graceful beings.  He had to make women no less capable of suffering, no less world-wearied, than his country.