outstretched arms, are already sunk to the knees over the brow of the nearest hill; they have just passed a milestone with the cipher two; from overhead a great, piled, summer cumulus, as of a slumberous summer afternoon, beshadows them:  two miles! it might be hundreds.  In dealing with the Land of Beulah the artist lags, in both parts, miserably behind the text, but in the distant prospect of the Celestial City more than regains his own.  You will remember when Christian and Hopeful ‘with desire fell sick.’  ’Effect of the Sunbeams’ is the artist’s title.  Against the sky, upon a cliffy mountain, the radiant temple beams upon them over deep, subjacent woods; they, behind a mound, as if seeking shelter from the splendour—­one prostrate on his face, one kneeling, and with hands ecstatically lifted—­yearn with passion after that immortal city.  Turn the page, and we behold them walking by the very shores of death; Heaven, from this nigher view, has risen half-way to the zenith, and sheds a wider glory; and the two pilgrims, dark against that brightness, walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts.  No cut more thoroughly illustrates at once the merit and the weakness of the artist.  Each pilgrim sings with a book in his grasp—­a family Bible at the least for bigness; tomes so recklessly enormous that our second, impulse is to laughter.  And yet that is not the first thought, nor perhaps the last.  Something in the attitude of the manikins—­faces they have none, they are too small for that—­something in the way they swing these monstrous volumes to their singing, something perhaps borrowed from the text, some subtle differentiation from the cut that went before and the cut that follows after—­something, at least, speaks clearly of a fearful joy, of Heaven seen from the deathbed, of the horror of the last passage no less than of the glorious coming home.  There is that in the action of one of them which always reminds me, with a difference, of that haunting last glimpse of Thomas Idle, travelling to Tyburn in the cart.  Next come the Shining Ones, wooden and trivial enough; the pilgrims pass into the river; the blot already mentioned settles over and obliterates Christian.  In two more cuts we behold them drawing nearer to the other shore; and then, between two radiant angels, one of whom points upward, we see them mounting in new weeds, their former lendings left behind them on the inky river.  More angels meet them; Heaven is displayed, and if no better, certainly no worse, than it has been shown by others--a place, at least, infinitely populous and glorious with light—­a place that haunts solemnly the hearts of children.  And then this symbolic draughtsman once more strikes into his proper vein.  Three cuts conclude the first part.  In the first the gates close, black against the glory struggling from within.  The second shows us Ignorance—­alas! poor Arminian!—­hailing, in a sad twilight, the ferryman Vain-Hope; and in the third we behold him, bound hand and foot, and black already with the hue of his eternal fate, carried high over the mountain-tops of the world by two angels of the anger of the Lord.  ‘Carried to Another Place,’ the artist enigmatically names his plate—­a terrible design.