he left it thus, because he found the action too strained. So be it; but here is Day still involved in clouds, but now arousing from its slumbers, throwing off the mists of darkness, and rising with a tremendous energy of awakening life. The same character also pervades the Aurora and Crepuscule. They are not man and woman, they are types of ideas. One lifts its head, for the morning is coming; one holds its head abased, for the gloom of evening is drawing on. There is no joy in any of these figures. A terrible sadness and seriousness oppresses them. Aurora does not smile at the coming of the light, is not glad, has little hope, but looks upon it with a terrible weariness, almost with despair—for it sees little promise, and doubts far more than it hopes. Twilight, again, almost disdainfully sinks to repose. The day has accomplished almost nothing: oppressed and hopeless, it sees the darkness close about it. What Michel Angelo meant to embody in these statues can only be guessed—but certainly no trivial thought. Their names convey nothing. It was not beauty, or grace, or simple truth to nature, that he sought to express. In making them, the weight of this unexplained mystery of life hung over him; the struggle of humanity against superior forces oppressed him. The doubts, the despair, the power, the indomitable will of his own nature are in them. They are not the expressions of the natural day of the world, of the glory of the sunrise, the tenderness of the twilight, the broad gladness of day, or the calm repose of night; but they are seasons and epochs of the spirit of man—its doubts and fears, its sorrows and longings and unrealized hopes. The sad condition of his country oppressed him. Its shame overwhelmed him. His heart was with Savonarola, to whose excited preaching he had listened, and his mind was inflamed by the hope of a spiritual regeneration of Italy and the world. The gloom of Dante enshrouded him, and the terrible shapes of the “Inferno” had made deeper impression on his nature than all the sublimed glories of the “Paradiso.” His colossal spirit stood fronting the agitated storms of passions which then shook his country, like a rugged cliff that braves the tempest-whipped sea—disdainfully casting from its violent and raging waves, and longing almost with a vain hope for the time when peace, honor, liberty, and religion should rule the world. This at least would seem to be implied in the lines he wrote under his statue of Night, in response to the quatrain written there by Giovan’ Battista Strozzi. These are the lines of Strozzi:— “La notte che tu vedi in si dolci atti Dormire, fu da an angelo scolpita In questo sasso; e, perchè dorme, ha vita Destala, se no ’l credi, e parleratti.” Which may be thus rendered in English:— “Night, which in peaceful attitude you see Here sleeping, from this stone an angel wrought. Sleeping, it lives. If you believe it not, Awaken it, and it will speak to thee.”