I always did admire the gorgeous and solemn mysteries of his coloring. Rembrandt is like Hawthorne. He chooses simple and every-day objects, and so arranges light and shadow as to give them a sombre richness and mysterious gloom. “The House of the Seven Gables” is a succession of Rembrandt pictures, done in words instead of oils. Now, this pleases us, because our life really is a haunted one, the simplest thing in it _is_ a mystery, the invisible world always lies around us like a shadow, and therefore this dreamy, golden gleam of Rembrandt meets somewhat in our inner consciousness to which it corresponds.... * * * * * [Sidenote: Rubens and Shakespeare.] I should compare Rubens to Shakespeare, for the wonderful variety and vital force of his artistic power. I know no other mind he so nearly resembles. Like Shakespeare, he forces you to accept and to forgive a thousand excesses, and uses his own faults as musicians use discords, only to enhance the perfection of harmony. There certainly is some use, even in defects. A faultless style sends you to sleep. Defects rouse and excite the sensibility to seek and appreciate excellence. Some of Shakespeare’s finest passages explode all grammar and rhetoric like sky-rockets—the thought blows the language to shivers. * * * * * [Sidenote: Language of the Bible.] I rejoice every hour that I am among these scenes in my familiarity with the language of the Bible. In it alone can I find vocabulary and images to express what this world of wonder excites. * * * * * [Sidenote: The effect of Christianity.] As to Christianity not making men happier, methinks M. Belloc forgets that the old Greek tragedies are filled with despair and gloom, as their prevailing characteristic, and that nearly all the music of the world before Christ was in the minor scale, as since Christ it has come to be in the major. The whole creation has, indeed, groaned and travailed in pain together until now, but the mighty anthem has modulated since the Cross, and the requiem of Jesus has been the world’s birth-song of approaching jubilee. Music is a far better test, moreover, on such a point, than painting, for just where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is most sublimely strong. * * * * * [Sidenote: Real music.] To me, all music is sacred. Is it not so? All _real_ music, in its passionate earnest, its blendings, its wild, heart-searching tones, is the language of aspiration. So it may not be meant; yet, when we know God, so we translate it. * * * * * [Sidenote: Power of inward emotion.]