Or say that you who look upon this work, be old, and bring to it grey
hairs, a head bowed down, a mind on which the day of life has spent
itself, and the calm evening closes gently in. Is its appeal to you
confined to its presentment of the Past? Have you no share in this, but
while the grace of youth and the strong resolve of maturity are yours to
aid you? Look up again. Look up where the spirit is enthroned, and see
about her, reverend men, whose task is done; whose struggle is no more;
who cluster round her as her train and council; who have lost no share or
interest in that great rising up and progress, which bears upward with it
every means of human happiness, but, true in Autumn to the purposes of
Spring, are there to stimulate the race who follow in their steps; to
contemplate, with hearts grown serious, not cold or sad, the striving in
which they once had part; to die in that great Presence, which is Truth
and Bravery, and Mercy to the Weak, beyond all power of separation.
It would be idle to observe of this last group that, both in execution
and idea, they are of the very highest order of Art, and wonderfully
serve the purpose of the picture. There is not one among its
three-and-twenty heads of which the same remark might not be made.
Neither will we treat of great effects produced by means quite powerless
in other hands for such an end, or of the prodigious force and _colour_
which so separate this work from all the rest exhibited, that it would
scarcely appear to be produced upon the same kind of surface by the same
description of instrument. The bricks and stones and timbers of the Hall
itself are not facts more indisputable than these.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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