of pagan art, but with the solemn earnestness and travail of soul characteristic of the Christian creed, wrinkled and saddened with thought and worn out with vigils; and are striking examples of the truth, that while each human being can bear his own burden, the burden of the world’s mystery and pain crushes us to the earth.  The Persian Sibyl, the oldest of the weird sisterhood, to whom the sunset of life had given mystical lore, holds a book close to her eyes, as if from dimness of vision; the Libyan Sibyl lifts a massive volume above her head on to her knees; the Cumaean Sibyl intently reads her book at a distance from her dilated eyes; the Erythraean Sibyl, bareheaded, is about to turn over the page of her book; while the Delphic Sibyl, like Cassandra the youngest and most human-looking of them all, holds a scroll in her hand, and gazes with a dreamy mournfulness into the far futurity.  These splendid creations would abundantly reward the minute study of many days.  They show how thoroughly the great painter had entered into the history and spirit of these mysterious prophetesses, who, while they bore the sins and sorrows of a corrupt world, had power to look for consolation into the secrets of the future.

Very beautiful was this reverence paid to the Sibyl amid all the idolatries of paganism and the corruptions of later Judaism.  We may regard it as a relic of the early piety of the world.  One who could pass over the interests and distractions of her own time, and fix her gaze upon the distant future, must have seemed far removed from the common order of mankind, who live exclusively in the present, and can imagine no other or higher state of things than they see around them.  Standing as the heirs of all the ages on this elevated vantage-ground and looking back upon the long course of the centuries—­upon the eventful future of the Sibyl, which is the past to us—­it seems a matter of course that the world should have spun down the ringing grooves of change as it has done; and we fancy that this must have been obvious to the world’s gray fathers.  But though the age of the Sibyl seemed the very threshold of time, there was nothing to indicate this to her, nothing to show that she lived in the youth of the world, and that it was destined to ripen and expand with the process of the suns.  The same horizon that bounds us in these last days, bound her view in these early days; and things seemed as fully developed and stereotyped then as now, and to-morrow promised to be only a repetition of to-day.  To realise, therefore, that the world had a future, and to take the trouble of thinking what would happen a thousand years off, indicated no common habit of mind.