Here is Dürer's success: let and hindered as it really is, he makes us feel the inalienable constancy of rational desire, watching adverse circumstance as one beast of prey watches another. She keeps hold on the bird she has caught, the ideal that perhaps she will never fully enjoy. Michael Angelo pictures for us freedom from trammels, the freedom that action, thought and ecstasy give, the freedom that is granted to beauty by all who recognise it; Dürer shows us the constancy that bridges the intervals between such free hours, that gives continuity to man's necessarily spasmodic effort. Thus he typifies for us the Northern genius: as Michael Angelo's athletes might typify by their naked beauty and the unexplained impressiveness of their gestures, the genius of the sudden South--sudden in action, sudden in thought, suddenly mature, suddenly asleep--as day changes to night and night to day the more rapidly as the tropics are approached. [Illustration: Detail enlarged from the "Agony in the Garden." Etching on Iron, B. 19 _Between_ pp. 250 & 251] [Illustration: ANGEL WITH THE SUDARIUM Engraving in Iron, 1516. B. 26 _Between_ pp. 250 & 251] Instances of the highest imaginative power are rare in Dürer's work. The _Melancholy_ has had a world-wide success. The _Knight, Death and the Devil_ has one almost equal, but which is based on the facility with which it is associated with certain ideas dear to Christian culture, rather than on the creation of the mood in which these ideas arise. It does not move us until we know that it is an illustration of Erasmus's Christian Knight. Then all its dignity and mastery and the supremacy of the gifts employed on it are brought into touch with the idea, and each admirer operates, according to his imaginativeness, something of the transformation which Dürer had let slip or cool down before realising it. IV Among the prints with lesser reputations are several which attain a far higher success. There is the iron plate of the _Agony in the Garden,_ B. 19, already mentioned (p. 235), in which the storm-tortured tree and the broken light and shade are full of dramatic power (see illustration), the _Angel with the Sudarium_, B. 26, where the arabesque of the folds of drapery and cloud unite with the daring invention of the central figure to create a mood entirely consonant with the subject. There is the woman carried off by a man on an unicorn, in which the turbulence of the subject is expressed with unrivalled force by the rich and beautiful arabesque and black and white pattern.