Page:Zanoni.djvu/201

Rh not of the god, but the savage; utterly free, like the sublimer schools, from the common-place of imitation — apart, with them, from the conventional littleness of the Real — he grasps the imagination, and compels it to follow him, not to the heaven, but through all that is most wild and fantastic upon earth; a sorcery, not of the starry magian, but of the gloomy wizard — a man of romance, whose heart beat strongly, griping art with a hand of iron, and forcing it to idealise the scenes of his actual life. Before this powerful Will, Glyndon drew back more awed and admiring than before the calmer beauty which rose from the soul of Raffaele, like Venus from the deep. And now, as awaking from his reverie, he stood opposite to that wild and magnificent gloom of Nature which frowned on him from the canvass, the very leaves on those gnome-like, distorted trees, seemed to rustle sibylline secrets in his ear. Those rugged and sombre Apennines, the cataract that dashed between, suited, more than the actual scenes would have done, the mood and temper of his mind. The stern, uncouth forms at rest on the crags below, and dwarfed by the giant size of the Matter that reigned around them, impressed him with the might of Nature and the littleness of Man. As in genius of the more spiritual cast, the living man, and the soul that lives in him, are studiously made the prominent image ; and the mere accessories of scene kept down, and cast back, as if to show that the exile from paradise is yet the monarch of the outward world — so, in the landscapes of Salvator, the tree, the mountain, the waterfall, become the