“Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeah, and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.”  Who, in reading this magnificent Hebraism, in his conception, sees aught but the heroic son of Nun, with the out-stretched arm, and the greater and lesser light obsequious?  Doubtless there were to be seen hill and dale, and chariots and horsemen, on open plain, or winding by secret defiles, and all the circumstances and stratagems of war.  But whose eyes would have been conscious of this array at the interposition of the synchronic miracle?  Yet in the picture of this subject by the artist of the “Belshazzar’s Feast”—­no ignoble work either—­the marshalling and landscape of the war is everything, the miracle sinks into an anecdote of the day; and the eye may “dart through rank and file traverse” for some minutes, before it shall discover, among his armed followers, which is Joshua!  Not modern art alone, but ancient, where only it is to be found if anywhere, can be detected erring, from defect of this imaginative faculty.  The world has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting, transcending the figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes, in the great picture at Angerstein’s.  It seems a thing between two beings.  A ghastly horror at itself struggles with newly-apprehending gratitude at second life bestowed.  It cannot forget that it was a ghost.  It has hardly felt that it is a body.  It has to tell of the world of spirits.—­Was it from a feeling, that the crowd of half-impassioned by-standers, and the still more irrelevant herd of passers-by at a distance, who have not heard or but faintly have been told of the passing miracle, admirable as they are in design and hue—­for it is a glorified work—­do not respond adequately to the action—­that the single figure of the Lazarus has been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the mighty Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the greater half of the interest?  Now that there were not indifferent passers-by within actual scope of the eyes of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound of it had but faintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood to deny; but would they see them? or can the mind in the conception of it admit of such unconcerning objects? can it think of them at all? or what associating league to the imagination can there be between the seers, and the seers not, of a presential miracle?

Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a Dryad, we will ask whether, in the present low state of expectation, the patron would not, or ought not to be fully satisfied with a beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks?  Disseat those woods, and place the same figure among fountains, and falls of pellucid water, and you have a—­Naiad!  Not so in a rough print we have seen after Julio Romano, we think—­for it is long since—­there, by no process, with mere change of scene, could the figure have reciprocated characters.  Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, beautiful in convolution and distortion, linked to her connatural tree, co-twisting with its limbs her own, till both seemed either—­these, animated branches; those, disanimated members—­yet the animal and vegetable lives sufficiently kept distinct—­his Dryad lay—­an approximation of two natures, which to conceive, it must be seen; analogous to, not the same with, the delicacies of Ovidian transformations.