they have but to cast away the dust and scurf to rise and stand on their feet. He loved the very quarries of Carrara, those strange grey peaks which even at midday convey into any scene from which they are visible something of the solemnity and stillness of evening, sometimes wandering among them month after month, till at last their pale ashen colours seem to have passed into his painting; and on the crown of the head of the David there still remains a morsel of unhewn stone, as if by one touch to maintain its connexion with the place from which it was hewn.
And it is in this penetrative suggestion of life that the secret of that sweetness of his is to be found. He gives us no lovely natural objects like Lionardo, but only blank ranges of rock, and dim vegetable forms as blank as they; no lovely draperies and comely gestures of life, but only the austere truths of human nature; 'simple persons'—as he replied in his rough way to the querulous criticism of Julius the Second that there was no gold on the figures of the Sistine Chapel—'simple persons, who wore no gold on their garments.' But he penetrates us with a sense of that power which we associate with all the warmth and fulness of the world, and the sense of which brings into one's thoughts a swarm of birds and flowers and insects. The brooding spirit of life itself is there; and the summer may burst out in a moment.
