We have in other pictures the relation between the Mother and Child expressed and varied in a thousand ways; as where she contemplates him fondly—­kisses him, pressing his cheeks to hers; or they sport with a rose, or an apple, or a bird; or he presents it to his mother; these originally mystical emblems being converted into playthings.  In another sketch she is amusing him by tinkling a bell:—­the bell, which has a religious significance, is here a plaything.  One or more attendant angels may vary the group, without taking it out of the sphere of reality.  In a quaint but charming picture in the Wallerstein Collection, an angel is sporting with the Child at his mother’s feet—­is literally his playfellow; and in a picture by Cambiaso, Mary, assisted by an angel, is teaching her Child to walk.

* * * * *

To represent in the great enthroned Madonnas, the Infant Saviour of the world asleep, has always appeared to me a solecism:  whereas in the domestic subject the Infant slumbering on his mother’s knee, or cradled in her arms, or on her bosom, or rocked by angels, is a most charming subject.  Sometimes angels are seen preparing his bed, or looking on while he sleeps, with folded hands and overshadowing wings.  Sometimes Marry hangs over his pillow; “pondering in her heart” the wondrous destinies of her Child.  A poetess of our own time has given us an interpretation worthy of the most beautiful of these representations, in the address of the Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus,—­“Sleep, sleep, mine Holy One!”

  “And are thou come for saving, baby-browed
  And speechless Being? art thou come for saving? 
  The palm that grows beside our door is bowed
  By treadings of the low wind from the south,
  A restless shadow through the chamber waving,
  Upon its bough a bird sings in the sun. 
  But thou, with that close slumber on thy mouth,
  Dost seem of wind and sun already weary,
  Art come for saving, O my weary One?

  “Perchance this sleep that shutteth out the dreary
  Earth-sounds and motions, opens on thy soul
    High dreams on fire with God;
  High songs that make the pathways where they roll
  More bright than stars do theirs; and visions new
  Of thine eternal nature’s old abode. 
    Suffer this mother’s kiss,
    Best thing that earthly is,
  To glide the music and the glory through,
  Nor narrow in thy dream the broad upliftings
    Of any seraph wing. 
  Thus, noiseless, thus!—­Sleep, sleep, my dreaming One."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, vol. ii. p. 174.]

Such high imaginings might be suggested by the group of Michael Angelo,—­his famous “Silenzio:”  but very different certainly are the thoughts and associations conveyed by some of the very lovely, but at the same time familiar and commonplace, groups of peasant-mothers and sleeping babies—­the countless productions of the later schools—­even while the simplicity and truth of the natural sentiment go straight to the heart.