no means common.  For, as the peculiar characteristic of the Imaginative is its suggestive power, the effect of this figure must of necessity differ in different minds.  As in many other cases, there must needs be at least some degree of sympathy with the mind that imagined it, in order to any impression; and the degree in which that is made will always be in proportion to the congeniality between the agent and the recipient.  Should it appear, then, to any one as a thing of no meaning, it is not therefore conclusive that the Artist has failed.  For, if there be but one in a thousand to whose mind it recalls the deep stillness of Night, gradually broken by the awakening stir of Day, with its myriad forms of life emerging into motion, while their lengthened shadows, undistinguished from their objects, seem to people the earth with gigantic beings; then the dim, gray monotony of color transforming them to stone, yet leaving them in motion, till the whole scene becomes awful and mysterious as with moving statues;—­if there be but one in ten thousand who shall have thus imagined, as he stands before this embodied Dawn, then is it, for every purpose of feeling through the excited imagination, as true and real as if instinct with life, and possessing the mind by its living will.  Nor is the number so rare of those who have thus felt the suggestive sorcery of this sublime Statue.  But the mind so influenced must be one to respond to sublime emotions, since such was the emotion which inspired the Artist.  If susceptible only to the gay and beautiful, it will not answer.  For this is not the Aurora of golden purple, of laughing flowers and jewelled dew-drops; but the dark Enchantress, enthroned on rocks, or craggy mountains, and whose proper empire is the shadowy confines of light and darkness.

How all this is done, we shall not attempt to explain.  Perhaps the Artist himself could not answer; as to the quo modo in every particular, we doubt if it were possible to satisfy another.  He may tell us, indeed, that having imagined certain appearances and effects peculiar to the Time, he endeavoured to imbue, as it were, some human form with the sentiment they awakened, so that the embodied sentiment should associate itself in the spectator’s mind with similar images; and further endeavoured, that the form selected should, by its air, attitude, and gigantic proportions, also excite the ideas of vastness, solemnity, and repose; adding to this that indefinite expression, which, while it is felt to act, still leaves no trace of its indistinct action.  So far, it is true, he may retrace the process; but of the informing life that quickened his fiction, thus presenting the presiding Spirit of that ominous Time, he knows nothing but that he felt it, and imparted it to the insensible marble.