Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/362

 Venetians are so great. That praise is the proper apanage of the Milanese and the Roman schools—of Michel Angelo and Leonardo. Those had more of thought and fancy, of meaning and motive. But since the Greek sculptors there was never a race of artists so humbly and so wholly devoted to the worship of beauty. This was enough for them; and for no other workmen. First among these pen-and-ink landscapes of Titian is one which gives us in full outline the likeness of a high hill, rising over a fort; before and beyond it a wild length of broken land expands and undulates, clothed with all manner of trees in full beauty of blossom and leaf, haunted by flying and settling birds. Next to this we find a sudden sunny bank in the dim depth of a wood, with a wolf at watch and a rabbit at wait. Next, a bay deeply wooded to the verge of the soft sea, with low rocks far off under the wash of the tender water. The fourth design is traversed by a river, which curves rapidly and roughly round the sudden steep of a broken bank, fringed with wild herbage and foliage of untrimmed and windy growth; in front, where the wide water elbows its way round a corner of grassy land, a little child is embracing a lamb, with fat strenuous arms and intent face; hard by is the stump of a felled tree, well-nigh buried in rank overgrowth of deep wild grass; beyond this the rising towers of a city watered by the further stream, and a remote church seen among tall slim stems of trees. Next to this we find a city set among the sloping folds of a hill-country; full in front of the design are two firs, rigidly clipped and pared up to the topmost tuft; on a rise of ground beyond these a small close