Shelley wrote concerning this work, "Standing before the picture of St. Cecilia, you forget that it is a picture as you look at it, and yet it is most unlike any of those things which we call reality. It is of the inspired and ideal kind, and seems to have been conceived and executed in a similar state of feeling to that which produced among the ancients those perfect specimens of poetry and sculpture which are the baffling models of succeeding generations. There is a unity and a perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure, St. Cecilia, seems wrapt in such inspiration as produced her image in the painter's mind; her deep, dark, eloquent eyes lifted up, her chestnut hair flung back from her forehead: she holds an organ in her hands; her countenance, as it were, calmed by the depth of her passion and rapture, and penetrated throughout with the warm and radiant light of life. She is listening to the music of heaven, and, as I imagine, has just ceased to sing, for the four figures that surround her evidently point, by their attitudes, towards her, particularly St. John, who, with a tender, yet impassioned gesture, bends his countenance towards her, languid with the depth of his emotion. At her feet lie various instruments of music, broken and unstrung. Of the coloring I do not speak; it eclipses Nature, yet it has all her truth and softness." Raphael was now loaded with honors. Henry VIII. urged him to visit England and become attached to his court. Francis I. was eager to make him court painter of France. Often the artist shut himself up in his palace, and applied himself so closely to his books and pictures that people said he was melancholy. He was so deeply interested in history that he thought of writing some historical works. He had planned and partially completed a book on ancient Rome, which should reproduce to the world the city in its former grandeur. He left a manuscript on art and artists, which Vasari found most valuable in his biographies. He sent artists into all the neighboring countries to collect studies from the antique. He loved poetry and philosophy.