There are few things more striking, more interesting to a thoughtful mind, than to trace through all the poetry, literature, and art of the Middle Ages that broad ever-present distinction between the practical and the contemplative life. This was, no doubt, suggested and kept in view by the one grand division of the whole social community into those who were devoted to the religious profession (an immense proportion of both sexes) and those who were not. All through Dante, all through the productions of mediæval art, we find this pervading idea; and we must understand it well and keep it in mind, or we shall never be able to apprehend the entire beauty and meaning of certain religious groups in sculpture and painting, and the significance of the characters introduced. Thus, in subjects from the Old Testament, Leah always represents the practical, Rachel, the contemplative life. In the New Testament, Martha and Mary figure in the same allegorical sense; and among the saints we always find St. Catharine and St. Clara patronising the religious and contemplative life, while St. Barbara and St. Ursula preside over the military or secular existence. It was a part, and a very important part, of that beautiful and expressive symbolism through which art in all its forms spoke to the popular mind. For myself, I have the strongest admiration for the _practical_, but the strongest sympathy with the _contemplative_ life. I bow to Leah and to Martha, but my love is for Rachel and for Mary. [Illustration] 90. Bettina does not describe nature, she informs it, with her own life: she seems to live in the elements, to exist in the fire, the air, the water, like a sylph, a gnome, an elf; she does not contemplate nature, she _is_ nature; she is like the bird in the air, the fish in the sea, the squirrel in the wood. It is one thing to describe nature, and quite another unconsciously so to inform nature with a portion of our own life. [Illustration] 91. Joanna Baillie had a great admiration of Macaulay’s Roman Ballads. “But,” said some one, “do you really account them as poetry?” She replied, “They _are_ poetry if the sounds of the trumpet be music!” [Illustration] 92. All my own experience of life teaches me the _contempt_ of cunning, not the _fear_. The phrase “profound cunning” has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased. People dissemble sometimes who yet hate dissembling, but a “cunning mind” emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning. That “pleasure in deceiving and aptness to be deceived” usually go together, was one of the wise sayings of the wisest of men. [Illustration] 93.