SCULPTURE.
As when, O lady mine,
With chiselled touch
The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mould,
The more the marble wastes
The more the statue grows.
Sonnet. M. ANGELO. Trans. of MRS. H. ROSCOE.
Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater
To raise the dead to life than to create
Phantoms that seem to live.
Michael Angelo. H.W. LONGFELLOW.
So stands the statue that enchants the world,
So bending tries to veil the matchless boast,
The mingled beauties of exulting Greece.
The Seasons: Summer. J. THOMSON.
And the cold marble leapt to life a god.
The Belvedere Apollo. H.H. MILMAN.
Or view the lord of the unerring bow,
The god of life, and poesy, and light.—
The sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow
All radiant from his triumph in the fight;
The shaft hath just been shot,—the arrow bright
With an immortal's vengeance; in his eye
And nostril beautiful disdain, and might
And majesty, flash their full lightnings by,
Developing in that one glance the Deity.
But in his delicate form—a dream of love,
Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast
Longed for a deathless lover from above,
And maddened in that vision—are exprest
All that ideal beauty ever blessed
The mind within its most unearthly mood,
When each conception was a heavenly guest,
A ray of immortality, and stood,
Starlike, around, until they gathered to a god!
Childe Harold, Canto IV. LORD BYRON.