Page:Table-Talk, vol. 2 (1822).djvu/23

 ever will speak on) of ages past to ages yet to come !

Pictures are a set of chosen images, a stream of pleasant thoughts passing through the mind. It is a luxury to have the walls of our rooms hung round with them, and no less so to have such a gallery in the mind, to con over the relies of ancient art bound up “within the book and volume of the brain, unmixed (if it were possible) with baser matter!” A life passed among pictures, in the study and the love of art, is a happy noiseless dream: or rather, it is to dream and to be awake at the same time; for it has all “the sober certainty of waking bliss,” with the romantic voluptuousness of a visionary and abstracted being. They are the bright consummate essences of things, and “he who knows of these delights to taste and interpose them oft, is not unwise!'—The Orion, which I have here taken occasion to descant upon, is one of a collection of excellent pictures, as this collection is itself one of a series from the old masters,