Michel Angelo may build his dome of marble, and human intellect may see as clearly as if God had said it that no other dome can ever be built so grand, so beautiful.  But above St. Peter’s hangs the blue tent-dome of the sky, vaster, rounder, elastic, unfathomable, making St. Peter’s look small as a drinking-cup, shutting it soon out of sight to north, east, south, and west, by the mysterious horizon-fold which no man can lift.  And beyond this horizon-fold of our sky shut down again other domes, which the wisest astronomer may not measure, in whose distances our little ball and we, with all our spinning, can hardly show like a star.  If St. Peter’s were swallowed up to-morrow, it would make no real odds to anybody but the Pope.  The probabilities are that Michel Angelo himself has forgotten all about it.

Titian and Raphael, and all the great brotherhood of painters, may kneel reverently as priests before Nature’s face, and paint pictures at sight of which all men’s eyes shall fill with grateful tears; and yet all men shall go away, and find that the green shade of a tree, the light on a young girl’s face, the sleep of a child, the flowering of a flower, are to their pictures as living life to beautiful death.

Coming to Art’s two highest spheres,—­music of sound and music of speech,—­we find that Beethoven and Mozart, and Milton and Shakespeare, have written.  But the symphony is sacred only because, and only so far as, it renders the joy or the sorrow which we have felt.  Surely, the interpretation is less than the thing interpreted.  Face to face with a joy, a sorrow, would a symphony avail us?  And, as for words, who shall express their feebleness in midst of strength?  The fettered helplessness in spite of which they soar to such heights?  The most perfect sentence ever written bears to the thing it meant to say the relation which the chemist’s formula does to the thing he handles, names, analyzes, can destroy, perhaps, but cannot make.  Every element in the crystal, the liquid, can be weighed, assigned, and rightly called; nothing in all science is more wonderful than an exact chemical formula; but, after all is done, will remain for ever unknown the one subtle secret, the vital centre of the whole.

But the souls who have a “genius for affection” have no outer dome, no higher and more vital beauty; no subtle secret of creative motive force to elude their grasp, mock their endeavor, overshadow their lives.  The subtlest essence of the thing they worship and desire, they have in their own nature,—­they are.  No schools, no standards, no laws can help or hinder them.