he recalls the hour, when that broad canvass was first stretched upon its frame, and Raphael stood before it, and laid the first colors upon it, and beheld the figures one by one born into life, and ’looked upon the work of his own hands with a smile, that it should have succeeded so well.’  He recalls too, the hour, when, the task accomplished, the pencil dropped from the master’s dying hand, and his eyes closed to open on a more glorious transfiguration, and at length the dead Raphael lay in his own studio, before this wonderful painting, more glorious than any conqueror under the banners and armorial hatchments of his funeral!

“Think you, that such sights and thoughts as these do not move the heart of a young man and an artist!  And when he goes forth into the open air, the sun is going down, and the gray ruins of an antique world receive him.  From the Palace of the Cesars he looks down into the Forum, or towards the Coliseum; or westward sees the last sunshine strike the bronze Archangel, which stands upon the Tomb of Adrian.  He walks amid a world of Art in ruins.  The very street-lamps, that light him homeward, burn before some painted or sculptured image of the Madonna!  What wonder is it, if dreams visit him in his sleep,—­nay, if his whole life seem to him a dream!  What wonder, if, with a feverish heart and quick hand, he strive to reproduce those dreams in marble or on canvass.”

Foolish Paul Flemming! who both admired and praised this little sketch, and yet was too blind to see, that it was written from the heart, and not from the imagination!  Foolish Paul Flemming! who thought, that a girl of twenty could write thus, without a reason!  Close upon this followed another pencil sketch, which he likewise read, with the lady’s permission.  It was this.

“The whole period of the Middle Ages seems very strange to me.  At times I cannot persuade myself that such things could have been, as history tells us; that such a strange world was a part of our world,—­that such a strange life was a part of the life, which seems to us who are living it now, so passionless and commonplace.  It is only when I stand amid ruined castles, that look at me so mournfully, and behold the heavy armour of old knights, hanging upon the wainscot of Gothic chambers; or when I walk amid the aisles of some dusky minster, whose walls are narrative ofhoar antiquity, and whose very bells have been baptized, and see the carved oaken stalls in the choir, where so many generations of monks have sat and sung, and the tombs, where now they sleep in silence, to awake no more to their midnight psalms;—­it is only at such times, that the history of the Middle Ages is a reality to me, and not a passage in romance.